SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
'Hunting for Conservation' Backfires
from ScienceNOW Daily
News
African lions are one step away from
becoming an endangered species, and a
measure designed to preserve them is to
blame. A new study suggests that hunters
who pay to shoot the animals are killing
too many of the big cats.
Seventy years ago, the kings of the
jungle numbered 450,000. Now the lion
population has dwindled to less than a
tenth of that. In the 1980s and 1990s,
African nations started to think an old
practice might hold the solution to
saving the lion: trophy hunting. They
hoped that by allowing rich game-chasers
to shoot a few animals, landowners would
have an incentive to conserve lion
habitats and keep the species alive
while boosting their local economies. In
the meantime, it became conventional
wisdom to blame the decline on factors
such as conversion of lion habitat for
agriculture, disease, and killings by
locals upset over lion attacks on people
or livestock.
But the newest research, to be
published in an upcoming issue of
Conservation Biology, shows
that at least in Tanzania--home to more
lions than any other country--that isn't
the case. Led by Craig Packer of the
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, a
team of biologists took a closer look at
the diminishing lion populations in
Tanzania over the last decade.
Read more...
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