U.S. Department of Agriculture: Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service
United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications
Document Type
Article
Date of this Version
2017
Citation
Pepin KM, Kay SL, Davis AJ. 2017 Comment on: ‘Blood does not buy goodwill: allowing culling increases poaching of a large carnivore’. Proc. R. Soc. B 284: 20161459.
Abstract
Chapron & Treves [1] present a framework for examining effects of wolf culling policies on wolf population growth rate. They develop a population growth model that estimates an effect of the amount of time per year legal culling is allowed (‘policy effect’) on wolf population growth rates, separate from an effect of culling. They infer that there is substantial evidence for a negative relationship between the proportion of the year that the culling policy is in effect and the population growth rate because 83% of the posterior distribution for the policy effect parameter was negative. They conclude that when it is legal to cull wolves, their population growth rate is slower than it would be when it is not legal to kill wolves, even after accounting for effects of culling on population growth rates. By considering additional analyses showing that the levels of legal culling are not causing negative density-dependence, they argue that wolf culling policies devalue wolves in the public’s eye such that poaching activity increases. We have several major issues with the conclusions drawn from this work.
Comments
Copyright 2017 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License