Estimating Poaching Opportunity and Potential

Treves, Adrian; Browne-Nuñez, Christine; Hogberg, Jamie; Karlsson, Frank; Naughton‐Treves, Lisa; Rust, Niki A.; Voyles, Zachary

doi:10.1002/9781119376866.ch11

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Prior research studies report that hound handlers as a group contain a substantial contingent willing to break the law and flout regulations intended to protect animals and more so than other groups active in wolf range. This hypothesis is supported by independent lines of data on intentions to poach [20; 23; 42]. Actual poaching evidence is consistent.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 52%

Adverse effects of hunting with hounds on participating animals and human bystanders

Treves

Menefee

2022

Preprint

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In the face of biodiversity crises, some societies are re-examining many human uses of nature. One activity that may once have been unobjectionable has undergone little scrutiny in most countries: hunting mammals with free-running hounds. We present two novel datasets about this under-studied hunting method. In Wisconsin, USA, hounds and gray wolves occasionally interacted aggressively and human by-standers reported adverse interactions with hounds and their handlers. Self-selected samples cannot be used to extrapolate in space or time but do provide new information. Between 1999 and 2012, 176 hounds were reported to have suffered injury during encounters with wolves. No government data were collected on how many wolves or other non-target animals were injured by hounds as required by the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Between 2015-2021, bystanders (n=105) reported various incidents of illegal behavior by hounds and handlers, adverse interactions with law enforcement, and other adverse events. We propose reforms to wildlife policy, law enforcement policy, greater oversight of hounding, and criminal prosecution. We discuss the implications for theories of dog domestication.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 52%

Adverse effects of hunting with hounds on participating animals and human bystanders

Treves

Menefee

2022

Preprint

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“…If so, locations more prone to poaching might instead include more remote areas. Remote hunting zones might reasonably be implicated given that recent research on inclination to poach indeed implicates hunters in both the NRM and in the state of Wisconsin ( Treves and Martin 2011 ; Treves et al 2013 ; Treves et al 2017a ). After Liberg et al (2012) , attention to poaching grew in the wolf research community.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mismeasured mortality: correcting estimates of wolf poaching in the United States

Treves

Artelle

Darimont

et al. 2017

Journal of Mammalogy

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131

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Measuring rates and causes of mortalities is important in animal ecology and management. Observing the fates of known individuals is a common method of estimating life history variables, including mortality patterns. It has long been assumed that data lost when known animals disappear were unbiased. We test and reject this assumption under conditions common to most, if not all, studies using marked animals. We illustrate the bias for 4 endangered wolf populations in the United States by reanalyzing data and assumptions about the known and unknown fates of marked wolves to calculate the degree to which risks of different causes of death were mismeasured. We find that, when using traditional methods, the relative risk of mortality from legal killing measured as a proportion of all known fates was overestimated by 0.05–0.16 and the relative risk of poaching was underestimated by 0.17–0.44. We show that published government estimates are affected by these biases and, importantly, are underestimating the risk of poaching. The underestimates have obscured the magnitude of poaching as the major threat to endangered wolf populations. We offer methods to correct estimates of mortality risk for marked animals of any taxon and describe the conditions under which traditional methods produce more or less bias. We also show how correcting past and future estimates of mortality parameters can address uncertainty about wildlife populations and increase the predictability and sustainability of wildlife management interventions.

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Conservation Forensics: The Intersection of Wildlife Crime, Forensics, and Conservation

Haines

Webb

Wallace

2021

Wildlife Biodiversity Conservation

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Estimating Poaching Opportunity and Potential

Cited by 3 publications

References 41 publications

Adverse effects of hunting with hounds on participating animals and human bystanders

Adverse effects of hunting with hounds on participating animals and human bystanders

Mismeasured mortality: correcting estimates of wolf poaching in the United States

Conservation Forensics: The Intersection of Wildlife Crime, Forensics, and Conservation

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