Legal Big-game Hunting Has Minimal Impact On African Species

The impact of tourists legally hunting large mammals in Tanzania is relatively benign, shows a UC Davis study of hunting areas in that country. Areas set aside solely for the purpose of big game hunting have the beneficial effect of protecting habitats and many species living there. Tourist hunting usually takes less than 10 percent of large mammal populations annually in Tanzania, says Tim Caro, a professor in UC Davis' wildlife, fish and conservation biology department. A few species, however, are exploited at dangerously high levels from a conservation standpoint, Caro says, including eland, and possibly small antelope, and perhaps lions and leopards. For those species, the hunting quotas need to be reduced to let their populations recover. The study, published recently in the African Journal of Ecology, is one of only a few attempts to determine what level of big game hunting is detrimental to a population, Caro says. The study uses aerial survey data to count the population sizes and matches these to hunting offtake. A related study, published in the same issue of the journal, shows that species protection efforts by game scouts and park rangers in Tanzania game reserves and national parks can be very important for keeping animal populations in good shape. This finding proved surprising, "because this is such a poor country and only relatively small sums of money are allocated for fuel and vehicles," Caro says.