The wildlife conservation institution (Institution) needs to reform to maintain legitimacy and relevancy in the 21st century. Institutional reform is inherently slow. Limitations resulting from historical and resource dependencies between state wildlife agencies and hunters have left the Institution poorly positioned to meet changing ecological and social complexities. In this paper, we suggest that an ideal Institution would have the following 4 components: broad‐based funding, trustee‐based governance, multidisciplinary science as the basis of recommendations from professional staff, and involvement of diverse stakeholders and partners. Our suggestions reflect the fundamental tenets of the Public Trust Doctrine, which we believe is the foundation of the Institution. In bringing forth these ideas, we hope to encourage discussion about how the Institution should reform to meet the changing needs of society.

Recent evolution of the wildlife management institution in the United States includes adoption of good governance principles, wherein stakeholders expect and are provided opportunities for input and involvement in making decisions about public wildlife resources. Concurrently and perhaps paradoxically, state wildlife agencies are encouraged to operate with fidelity to the public trust doctrine and the principles of public trust administration, which may require trust administrators (i.e., appointed commissioners and public wildlife managers) to keep trust beneficiaries (i.e., theoretically all citizens, but especially special interests) at arm's length (i.e., restricted from having undue control) with respect to directly influencing decision-making. In addition, public trust administration includes citizens taking responsibility for holding trust administrators accountable and requires government to provide citizens recourse for doing so. In practice, however, accountability typically is achieved through political influence or litigation, both routes antithetical to efficient public trust resource administration. This set of potentially conflicting expectations-practicing good governance through citizens' engagement in wildlife decision-making processes, limiting beneficiaries' direct influence on decisions of trust administrators, and citizens' responsibility for holding trust administrators accountable-creates an apparent conundrum for state wildlife agencies. As a catalyst for deliberation about the implications of public trust doctrine in the wildlife profession, we describe potential problems and suggest ways for public wildlife managers to perform their responsibilities with due diligence to the combined expectations and requirements of good governance and the public trust doctrine. Ó 2014 The Wildlife Society.

In many states, case law, statutes, or constitutions establish a “public trust in wildlife,” a derivative of the public trust doctrine. Although interpretation differs across jurisdictions, the underlying principle of wildlife as a public trust resource, explicitly expressed or not, carries with it broad obligations and standards of trust administration by government to ensure benefits of wildlife are available to all citizens, present and future. The standards for execution of responsibilities by trustees (elected officials or their appointees, such as commissions) and trust managers (e.g., wildlife professionals working for state wildlife agencies) require understanding beneficiaries' varied interests in the wildlife resource, which in turn requires effective public input and involvement, following the precepts of good governance, such as inclusiveness, openness, fairness, transparency, and accountability. Managing wildlife resources as public trust assets entails providing sustainable net benefits from the existence of wildlife and its co‐existence with humans. Wildlife managers need an approach to wildlife management that is philosophically consistent with the benefits‐production focus of trust administration. We explain that impacts management is such an approach, essentially tailor‐made for fulfilling trust‐management responsibilities because of its focus on diverse, stakeholder‐value‐defined outcomes (desired impacts) and its reliance on stakeholders' input for identifying and weighing competing outcomes desired by them. Impacts management is a wildlife resource management approach for providing sustainable, highly relevant public trust administration. © 2013 The Wildlife Society.

Humans have used wild furbearers for various purposes for thousands of years. Today, furbearers are sustainably used by the public for their pelts, leather, bones, glands, meat, or other purposes. In North America, contemporary harvest of furbearers has evolved along with trap technologies and societal concerns, and is now highly regulated and more closely coupled with harvest analysis and population monitoring. Traps and regulated trapping programs provide personal or cultural rewards that can also support conservation, and can assist with advancing ecological knowledge through research, protecting endangered species, restoring populations or habitats, protecting personal property, and enhancing public health and safety. However, animal welfare and trap selectivity remain important topics for furbearer management in North America, as they have for more than a century. A related international challenge to modern furbearer management came with the Wild Fur Regulation by the European Union, which passed in 1991. This regulation prohibited use of foothold traps in many European countries and the importation of furs and manufactured fur products to Europe from countries that allowed use of foothold traps or trapping methods that did not meet internationally agreed‐upon humane trapping standards. To address existing national concerns and requirements of the Wild Fur Regulation, the United States and European Union signed a non‐binding bilateral understanding that included a commitment by the United States to evaluate trap performance and advance the use of improved traps through development of best management practices (BMPs) for trapping. Our testing followed internationally accepted restraining‐trap standards for quantifying injuries and capture efficiency, and we established BMP pass‐fail thresholds for these metrics. We also quantified furbearer selectivity, and qualitatively assessed practicality and user safety for each trap, yielding overall species‐specific performance profiles for individual trap models. We present performance data for 84 models of restraining traps (6 cage traps, 68 foothold traps, 9 foot‐encapsulating traps, and 1 power‐activated footsnare) on 19 furbearing species, or 231 trap‐species combinations. We conducted post‐mortem examinations on 8,566 furbearers captured by trappers. Of the 231 trap model‐species combinations tested, we had sufficient data to evaluate 173 combinations, of which about 59% met all BMP criteria. Pooling species, cage traps produced the lowest average injury score (common injuries included tooth breakage), with minimal differences across other trap types; species‐specific patterns were generally similar, with the exception of raccoons (Procyon lotor) for which foot‐encapsulating traps performed better than other foot‐restraining trap types. Padded‐jaw foothold traps performed better than standard‐jaw models for many species, though often similar to and occasionally worse than offset‐ or laminated‐jaw models. Most traps we tested had high capture efficiency; ...

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