The potential impacts of changes in bear hunting policy for hunting organisations in Croatia

Abstract

The brown bear (Ursus arctos) in Croatia is currently being managed through trophy hunting, with quotas allocated to local hunting organisations. Human-bear conflict is present at a low level, but any losses are compensated by the hunting organisations that benefit from bear hunting. Attitudes towards bears are generally positive, and the bear population appears stable, or even increasing. Croatia's current bear hunting policy relies upon both the ecological sustainability of the quotas and the economic sustainability of the hunting organisations. To address the first of these pillars of current policy, we used a two-sex matrix model of the bear population to investigate the biological sustainability of current hunting levels. The model suggests that if the annual allocated quota were fully realised, the population would suffer a considerable decrease over 10 years. A likely explanation for the mismatch between this result and the observed stability of the population is that the bear population size is underestimated. To address the second pillar, we quantified the current structure, costs and benefits of bear hunting to hunting organisations through an interview survey with hunting managers. We found that bear hunting is a substantial component of hunting organisations' income, supporting the other activities of the organisation. Croatia's recent accession to the EU will require changes in their bear management system, potentially stopping bear trophy hunting. Therefore, we assessed the changes in hunting organisations' budgets in the absence of bear hunting. Our results demonstrate that a loss of bear trophy hunting would result in a substantial loss of income to the hunting organisations. Moving bear hunting and compensation mechanisms from local management and responsibility to a more centralised system without trophy hunting, as suggested by EU legislation, will lead to considerable uncertainties. These include how to make centralised decisions on population targets and offtake levels for population control, given the uncertainty around population estimates, and on compensation payments given the loss of the current system which relies heavily on local income from trophy hunting, local relationships and informal monetary and non-monetary compensation.

Local attitudes toward Apennine brown bears: Insights for conservation issues

“…Factors affecting acceptance are multifaceted and context-dependent (Boitani, 1995(Boitani, , 2003Linnell & Boitani, 2012), and are thus best understood at a local scale, where the values and interests of different stakeholders stand out (Piédallu et al, 2016;Young et al, 2013). Given that attitudes and acceptance levels of local communities affect large carnivore conservation (Knott et al, 2014;Treves & Bruskotter, 2014), it is important to explore whether and how they vary across space.…”

Ecological and anthropogenic drivers of large carnivore depredation on sheep in Europe

“…Still, other components need to be considered. Bears are traditionally managed as a de facto game species in Croatia and the maintenance of a large population secures income for hunters in rural areas (Knott et al, 2014). Moreover, bear damage to sheep (and to beehives) is paid by local hunting associations, which are willing to pay the costs of compensation as a way to gain social acceptance for bear presence in the country (Majić et al, 2011).…”

Is diversionary feeding an effective tool for reducing human–bear conflicts? Case studies from North America and Europe

“…Since members of these organizations are predominantly local people, the compensation claims were often informally settled with goods (e.g. sacks of corn) rather than money (Knott et al 2014). Consequently large part of damages were not reported and/or recorded.…”

“…Additionally, local hunters likely paid more attention to prevent fraud by the owners and also likely reacted faster to prevent costly damages repeating at single localities, which are for example characteristic for Slovenia (Černe et al 2010). It is expected that amount of reported damages will substantially increase in Croatia in the next years with the change in bear status and compensation system (Knott et al 2014). Consequently there will likely be also stronger interest in the preventive measures from the government perspective.…”