Can Someone Explain Hunting to Me?

[slickpoppa]

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but it is a fact that hunting is necessary to keep many wild animal populations in check and healthy (many of their natural predators have been removed).

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Along these lines, in parts of Africa, certain animals such as elephants would be extinct if it weren’t for privately owned hunting concessions. Private owners have the incentive to not only keep the animal population thriving, but to also kill poachers.

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Solution to the tragedy of the commons at work, folks. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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Private ownership is not a panacea though. It stops poachers, but it does not necessarily stop overhunting by individual landowners. As long as people value animals more highly dead than alive, stopping overhunting is a serious problem even with private ownership. If the species in question is migratory and many different people own land in that species' range, then each landowner will have an incentive to kill as many of that animal as possible while that animal is on their land because they know that is exactly what everyone else will be doing. Of course, in theory, there are ways that you can contract around this problem, but the transaction costs and costs of enforcement may be prohibitively high. Also, it is not guaranteed that all the landowners will be rational and want to preserve the long term viability of the species contractually. They may just want to make as much money in the short term as possibly by killing every animal in sight.

There are really two solutions to this problem:
1. This is actually an instance where a monopoly can be good thing. If one landowner owns the entire range of land in which a particular species inhabits, then he will have an incentive to conserve the species because he does not have to worry about other landowners killing those animals as they migrate.
2. If there is strong tourist industry in which landowners can make more money by showing the animals to rich white people rather than killing them.