African Indaba Articles - wildlife-baldus.com

Hunting Benefits BiodiversityRolf Baldus Interviews Tim Caro, Professor, Dept. of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation BiologyUniversity of CaliforniaThe interview conducted by Dr. Rolf D. Baldus discusses the effects of legal hunting on wildlifemanagement. Prof. Caro has researched biodiversity in Tanzania for a quarter of a century. He wasan outspoken critic of all kinds of hunting when he started. Meanwhile his picture is moredifferentiated. Has he turned from Paulus into Saulus (to use the turnaround of the warrior Saulus’conversion in the New Testament)?Baldus: You have researched wildlife biology and management issues in Tanzania for 25 years. In the year1985 you published an article in SWARA, the East African Wildlife Society magazine that was highly criticalof biological arguments used by tourist hunters in East Africa and elsewhere. Since then you have continuedyour research. Any new findings or still anti-hunting?Caro: My views on tourist hunting have changed a lot since 1985. At that time I focused on one aspect ofhunting, namely the effect that removing animals can have on a population. For example, in my Swaraarticle, I discussed how big game hunters like to shoot the biggest males. New behavioral and ecologicalresearch studies at that time were showing that these large males were not old animals that would soon die,as hunters had claimed, but were likely to be the breeding males in the population. Similarly new studies inthe 1980s were showing that when an adult male lion that belongs to a pride is removed, new male lionscome in and kill young cubs in order to bring the females back into heat quicker. So shooting territorial malelions has the effect of killing a generation of cubs as well.Hunters still have these effects on animal populations, of course, but they also have an important positiveinfluence on habitat conservation and this is where I have been focusing my attention over the last 5 years.What I mean by this is that large areas of land, especially in Tanzania, have been set aside expressly for thepurpose of tourist hunting, and in so doing, they have stopped people moving into these areas to cultivateand graze.So if you look at the big picture, conserving the numerous species that live in an area - plants, fungi, insects,birds, reptiles etc - does it really matter if hunters reduce the lion population or the eland population to verylow levels? Probably not, so if you direct your attention to many species, or biodiversity as it is now called,hunters have a very positive effect because the money that they bring into the country makes it economicallyworthwhile for the government to protect an area.The other thing that has made me more sympathetic to tourist hunting, other than a change of personalfocus, is that I now believe that it has a trivial effect on mammal and bird populations compared to illegalhunting. The Illegal hunting takes two forms in Tanzania: hunting by residents who have obtained permits toshoot a few animals but who take many more than they are allowed, and hunting by people who have nopermits at all. I don't think anyone really knows exactly how much is taken illegally but huge numbers ofanimals are involved each year, far, far more than that taken by tourist hunters.Baldus: Could you please specify the positive effects which hunting tourism has on habitat conservation?Caro: Big game hunting has an important role in preserving large areas of land from agriculture andsettlement in Tanzania and elsewhere. The Government has set aside large areas of land as GameReserves, over 100,000 km2 in total, which allow for limited tourist hunting. The money generated from thistype of hunting through licenses and fees is used as a justification for keeping people out of these areassince the money can be used by the Government to build roads or hospitals etc. My research group at theUniversity of California at Davis has shown that Game Reserves are beneficial for both mammals andvegetation.Using aerial census data collected by the Conservation Information Centre in Arusha, we were able tocompare the density of about 20 species of large mammals in National Parks, Game Reserves, GameControlled Areas and Open Areas across the country. We found that densities of most species were similarin Game Reserves and in National Parks despite certain species being shot by tourist hunters which showsthat Game Reserves are good at protecting mammal species.85