Decriminalising Hunting May Help Save Endangered Animals

Going by the demand-supply principle, the decriminalisation of hunting can help in preservation of rare species.

It is almost every other day that we come across news of deforestation, or species becoming endangered and even extinct due to illegal poaching and destruction of habitat. This is followed by the usual drama of politicians, “harshly condemning” such events and making “firm commitments” to stop it from happening, using more “stringent laws”.

But politicians often ignore a fact widely known to economists: If there is demand for something, someone will supply it for a price. As long as there is a demand for ivory, tiger skin, and other animal parts, there will be poaching. As long as people demand more luxury apartments and more manufactured goods, forest land will be cleared for it. More government regulation is not the way to go forward, if we want to save forests and the animals inhabiting them.

Decriminalise Hunting of Animals

The government can accept the economic incentive for these activities instead of trying to outlaw it. There is a need to work with the forces of supply and demand rather than legislating them away. In other words, to preserve flora and fauna, they must sell off all the forests as private property. Simultaneously, they must decriminalise the hunting of animals, and the trade in animal body parts.

Sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? To understand better how privatisation will help conserve species and habitats, let us look at farms. Billions of chicken, sheep and other domestic animals are killed every year. Yet those species are in no danger of extinction. Why? Because they are private property of the farmer. Nobody but the farmer is allowed to kill his animals.

The farmer may choose to kill all his animals in one go and make more money now, but that would deprive him of future income. So the farmer thinks, “I’ll kill only half my sheep now, and let the rest breed and multiply so I will have more income next year.” The farmer has an economic incentive to invest in his animals by providing living space and letting them grow.

Now come back to the jungle. Even if a poacher knows that tigers or rhinos will become extinct, he thinks, “I would love to let these animals breed so that I can have more income next year. But if I don’t kill them now, some other fellow will. I will have nothing now, and nothing tomorrow as well.”

Tragedy of Commons

In economics, this is called the “tragedy of commons”. If everyone owns it, nobody owns it, and nobody has an incentive to preserve it.

Privatisation provides the economic incentive. Take the elephants in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana for example. Their elephant populations were earlier falling. But since they allowed sport hunting at game reserves, the population of elephants has been either growing or stable, but not falling.

In private hunting preserves, they have conservation practices so they have a steady supply of animals for hunters. In a year they might probably allow only 10 percent of the elephants to be hunted, for example, depending on how many they have. And there are prices. So the rarest animals cost more, naturally. But it also depends on gender.

So if you want to kill a young female elephant, who will have babies in the future, you might have to pay a lot more than you would to kill an old male elephant, since the herd size depends more on the number of females.

Incentive to Preserve Flora and Fauna

Interestingly, I found that it costs twice as much to kill a lion than it does to kill a lioness. Why? It turns out that if you kill a lioness, there is one less animal. But if you kill a lion, the next dominant lion of the pride will kill all the former leader’s cubs, which might otherwise have grown into trophy specimens for future hunters.

Or take the case of the Scimitar-horned oryx. It is believed that the sighting of an injured Scimitar Oryx was the origin of the unicorn myth. But I digress. The species is extinct in its native African wilderness. It is now found in captivity such as zoos and government-run enclosures and their number has fallen considerably.

The one place where it has thrived is Texas, USA. There, the oryxes are kept on private hunting ranches. These are huge tracts of land which are planted with flora from Africa so that the animals feel at home. Each year people pay significant sums to enjoy an African hunting safari without having to travel to Africa. Thus, the ranchers in the US and forest owners in Africa have an incentive to preserve their flora and fauna.

Preservation of Species

Simply put, deep pocketed real estate tycoons or industrialists won’t be stopped by animal rights activists taking to the streets or a few people hugging trees (popular form of activism in parts of India), or any other so-called grassroots activism. They can only be stopped by other deep-pocketed people; ones who will invest in forests for profit; ones who are willing to pay hefty sums for trophy hunting; people who will pay for a nice tiger skin rug, a fur coat, or beautifully carved ivory ornaments; they are the real hope for species and habitat preservation.

(The writer is an economist who looks for simple solutions to the complicated problems that ail our society.)

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