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Blood does not buy goodwill: allowing culling increases poaching of a large carnivore

Quantifying environmental crime and the effectiveness of policy interventions is difficult because perpetrators typically conceal evidence. To prevent illegal uses of natural resources, such as poaching endangered species, governments have advocated granting policy flexibility to local authorities b...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Chapron, Guillaume, Treves, Adrian
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4874699/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27170719
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.2939
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author Chapron, Guillaume
Treves, Adrian
author_facet Chapron, Guillaume
Treves, Adrian
author_sort Chapron, Guillaume
collection PubMed
description Quantifying environmental crime and the effectiveness of policy interventions is difficult because perpetrators typically conceal evidence. To prevent illegal uses of natural resources, such as poaching endangered species, governments have advocated granting policy flexibility to local authorities by liberalizing culling or hunting of large carnivores. We present the first quantitative evaluation of the hypothesis that liberalizing culling will reduce poaching and improve population status of an endangered carnivore. We show that allowing wolf (Canis lupus) culling was substantially more likely to increase poaching than reduce it. Replicated, quasi-experimental changes in wolf policies in Wisconsin and Michigan, USA, revealed that a repeated policy signal to allow state culling triggered repeated slowdowns in wolf population growth, irrespective of the policy implementation measured as the number of wolves killed. The most likely explanation for these slowdowns was poaching and alternative explanations found no support. When the government kills a protected species, the perceived value of each individual of that species may decline; so liberalizing wolf culling may have sent a negative message about the value of wolves or acceptability of poaching. Our results suggest that granting management flexibility for endangered species to address illegal behaviour may instead promote such behaviour.
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spelling pubmed-48746992016-05-25 Blood does not buy goodwill: allowing culling increases poaching of a large carnivore Chapron, Guillaume Treves, Adrian Proc Biol Sci Research Articles Quantifying environmental crime and the effectiveness of policy interventions is difficult because perpetrators typically conceal evidence. To prevent illegal uses of natural resources, such as poaching endangered species, governments have advocated granting policy flexibility to local authorities by liberalizing culling or hunting of large carnivores. We present the first quantitative evaluation of the hypothesis that liberalizing culling will reduce poaching and improve population status of an endangered carnivore. We show that allowing wolf (Canis lupus) culling was substantially more likely to increase poaching than reduce it. Replicated, quasi-experimental changes in wolf policies in Wisconsin and Michigan, USA, revealed that a repeated policy signal to allow state culling triggered repeated slowdowns in wolf population growth, irrespective of the policy implementation measured as the number of wolves killed. The most likely explanation for these slowdowns was poaching and alternative explanations found no support. When the government kills a protected species, the perceived value of each individual of that species may decline; so liberalizing wolf culling may have sent a negative message about the value of wolves or acceptability of poaching. Our results suggest that granting management flexibility for endangered species to address illegal behaviour may instead promote such behaviour. The Royal Society 2016-05-11 /pmc/articles/PMC4874699/ /pubmed/27170719 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.2939 Text en © 2016 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Articles
Chapron, Guillaume
Treves, Adrian
Blood does not buy goodwill: allowing culling increases poaching of a large carnivore
title Blood does not buy goodwill: allowing culling increases poaching of a large carnivore
title_full Blood does not buy goodwill: allowing culling increases poaching of a large carnivore
title_fullStr Blood does not buy goodwill: allowing culling increases poaching of a large carnivore
title_full_unstemmed Blood does not buy goodwill: allowing culling increases poaching of a large carnivore
title_short Blood does not buy goodwill: allowing culling increases poaching of a large carnivore
title_sort blood does not buy goodwill: allowing culling increases poaching of a large carnivore
topic Research Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4874699/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27170719
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.2939
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