Economics is the weapon of choice when it comes to trophy hunting and conservation
Hunting does NOT mean conservation, but conservation can mean hunting. What's the REAL economic story here?
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In 2016 I was commissioned by the Humane Society to study whether the claimed conservation benefits of trophy hunting made sense.
Trophy hunters claim that by paying large trophy fees (usually many thousands) to local communities to hunt lions, elephants, and so forth, they are incentivising the preservation of these animals.
Here’s my report.
I want to share how this research enhanced my views on hunting and the economic incentives in environmental conservation.
Does hunting equal conservation?
Trophy hunter groups promote a “conservation equation”, arguing that hunters put a value on wildlife that otherwise only imposes costs on local communities. Therefore Hunting = Conservation.
Neat, right?
There is some logic here. We value cattle, so we have a lot of cattle. We value chickens and pigs, so we have a lot of them too.
Why wouldn’t it be also the case with lions and elephants, especially if hunters pay thousands per animal?
It’s not that simple.
Consider whales. They were highly valued too. And we hunted many species nearly to extinction.
What’s the difference?
The difference is that even with the institutions and property rights over animals necessary to ensure that someone gets the value from conserved wildlife, it still matters whether the cost of sustaining those animal populations is below that value.
It’s a classic Ronald Coase question.
Only when the value of wildlife populations—for hunting, tourism, or any other valued way—exceeds the cost of preservation does that value contribute to the conservation of those populations.
Otherwise, the value ensures the depletion of the resource as the cost of conserving the resource for tomorrow exceeds its potential benefit.
What matters is the value of the cost of breeding and/or sustaining their populations in conservation areas relative to the total value placed on the animal, whether that value comes from hunting, tourism, or food.
The highest-value use of the animal is the one most likely to justify the cost of species protection.
Hunting very valuable whales didn’t save those populations. The cost of conserving those populations was higher than their value as blubber.
Because of this lack of economic incentive to conserve whales, we conserved their populations with plain old vanilla prohibitions.
Preservations means management
Even if the value of wildlife exceeds the cost of preserving those populations, there remain some uncomfortable realities for environmentalists when it comes to the economics of wildlife preservation.
Property rights over animal populations create incentives for rights holders to manage animal populations, not just conserve them. They want to ensure that populations thrive into the future, but also that the benefits are maximised over the costs.
There can sometimes be too many animals.
An optimal response at such times is to have fewer animals while preserving enough to ensure a valuable future population.
The cost of too many animals is very real. Botswana’s conservation efforts have resulted in troublingly large elephant populations. There is a major land use conflict here, and more elephants mean higher costs to nearby land users, whether for farming or urban uses.
In response, they have relocated many elephants to neighbouring nations but would, I imagine, prefer to earn foreign revenue from international trophy hunters to get the population down instead.
When Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi says he will send the elephants to Germany if the Germans don’t want the population culled, this is an expression of these costs.
Such dilemmas are not uncommon. According to Bob Katter, there are too many crocodiles, a protected species in Australia, and he reckons more hunting is needed.
There may even be a time in the future when we have too many whales in undesirable places and might want to update our approach to allow hunting or reduce populations in other ways.
Another uncomfortable part of creating property rights over animal populations is the resulting incentive to farm them. Plenty of lions exist because of the value of captive-bred lions for hunting (it’s called canned hunting).
The question is whether we want to preserve particular species by farming them or preserve a particular ecosystem that supports a wild population of that species, and how best to manage those wildlife populations.
An enhanced view
A few years later I looked into conservation funding and hunting in the United States. You can find my views in this report.
This research concludes that if we want to unpick the recipe for conservation, it isn’t about allowing hunting and automatically getting conservation.
As you might expect, it is about funding and creating the institutions that sustain and manage conservation areas for wildlife populations because of their broader economic and political value.
Then, as part of that management function, hunting can be incorporated if the revenue from hunting licensing, taxes, and permits, exceeds the extra management costs required.
The United States has well-funded land management and conservation agencies. Some states, like Colorado, have even experimented with repopulating conservation areas with wolves that were previously hunted to extinction in certain locations.
As a rich nation, it has many people who value the conservation areas and their wildlife populations. It also can minimise the costs on local people from the existence of those wildlife populations.
High value, low cost. This generates an economic and political incentive to preserve and manage wildlife populations and conservation areas.
Once this is achieved, hunting can be allowed and managed in the long-term interests of the various species and overall conservation efforts.
But remember, managing hunting is itself a costly task.
Populations need to be monitored. Licensing systems created and enforced. These are extra management costs that themselves need to be funded.
The scale of additional costs are demonstrated in this way in my report:
In the Australian state of Victoria, the Game Management Authority undertakes the narrow task of administering hunting licenses, including all associated enforcement and monitoring, and has an annual budget of AUD$5 million to manage 50,157 hunting licenses. However, the revenue raised from hunting licenses is less than half the cost of running the system, at AUD$2.5 million. The standard price in Victoria is USD$41 per license, yet the administration cost is USD$75 per license for this simple system with only eight different license types covering just three species.
Not only are management costs of hunting high but relying on licences, permits, and hunting-related taxes, to try and fund conservation efforts can lead to undesirable short-term incentives.
As our Botswana elephants case shows, wildlife populations often fluctuate enormously. This means that during high population periods, hunting can be done without fear of threatening the viability of the population of that species through the next cycle. The funding from this can cover some conversation costs.
But during the years when hunting needs to be wound down to allow populations to recover, revenue dries up. A funding system that bridges these gaps is preferable to ensure there are incentives aligned with longer-term conservation management.
Overall, it is the high value the non-hunting population places on wildlife and conservation areas, and the relatively low costs imposed on local populations from land preservation and wildlife, that ensures sufficient value to justify the high-cost land management institutions.
This enhanced view predicts that with more economic development and more value on wildlife and conservation areas by non-hunters, more managed hunting can be possible.
So what?
Conservation is costly. Managing wildlife populations is costly.
Simple ideas like Hunting = Conservation do not help us understand how to establish and fund the institutions necessary to actively manage conservation areas.
Generally, the cost of managing hunting is high and comes after the broader costs of conservation management have been established.
Although I haven’t followed any changes in the past five years or so, Namibia is a place where managed hunting and conservation seems to be functioning relatively well—costs from wildlife to the small local population are relatively low compared to the high value derived from conservation areas via tourism and hunting.
Local conservancies are essentially granted rights to the value derived from these areas. This is a partial take on the Coasian internationalisation of costs and benefits.
But I suspect that any continuing success will rely on the value of non-hunters abroad being directed to locals to carry on wildlife conservation.
There were no additional expenses incurred to conserve whales rather than hunt them, though by not hunting them (or all their krill) there is a significant opportunity cost.