Climate and Environmental Governance: Managing threatened wildlife: Missing the forest for the trees

Throughout history, human-wildlife conflict has posed problems to farmers. Until the late 20th century, this was normally addressed by killing wildlife. Whether one follows the 1980 World Conservation Strategy approach that regards wildlife as just a means to help support human economic well-being, or prefers a more philosophical and ethical rationale, wildlife, especially threatened species, now needs urgent attention.

Large wild animals have now been squeezed into clusters in scattered and entirely insufficient remnants of natural habitats. A few species thrive in these circumstances, but most do not. Efforts to manage human-wildlife conflict often tend to be reactive, piecemeal and plagued by short-term thinking.

Prevailing paradigms need to be shifted — a difficult challenge in view of the human tendency to resist change.

A basic problem is that we humans tend to see wildlife in terms of individuals in distress, not as populations that need to be managed, either directly or through sustained manipulation of habitat or prey.

Common words of exhortations applied to threatened wildlife nowadays include save, rescue, protect, preserve and boots-on-the-ground. Common exhortations regarding their habitat include conservation efforts, restore and plant. These words are important to raise awareness of and funds for conservation, but do little to address the underlying need: population management.

For some species, numbers need to be reduced, while others should be sustained at current levels. And for threatened ones, numbers need to be increased in order to prevent extinction. People like simple explanations that intuitively sound right, but might well be wrong because our generally poor understanding of basic biology promotes wrong answers.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE