INDIVIDUAL SPECIES-STATE ANALYSIS OF NATURESERVE’S “AT-RISK” CATEGORIES: HUNTING AND FISHING’S ROLE

I. INTRODUCTION Hunting and fishing can have two possible effects on wildlife's fragility. On the one hand, hunting and fishing directly reduces populations of plants and animals. On the other hand, it has been argued that hunters provide protection for species in two ways. First, their license revenues are used by state wildlife agencies to regulate hunting (sustainably) and to promote habitat enhancement. Second, the fact that several million Americans spend money on hunting and fishing trips provides incentives for landowners to provide habitat for species and provides incentives for sellers/leasers of equipment, lodging, and so on to encourage legislators to protect species. The goal of this article was to determine if hunting and fishing activities promote the well-being of species by analyzing NatureServe's (2005) "at-risk" assessment of individual vertebrate species in each state. We use a probit analysis of the binary at-risk variable and an ordered probit analysis of the five-category endangerment ranking. Sometimes, the hunting/fishing pressures imposed by humans on a species are largely responsible for dramatic reductions in the populations of those species. Examples from the U.S. experience include the American Bison, Passenger Pigeon (which was hunted to extinction), Grizzly Bear, Timber Wolf, Striped Bass, Blue Crabs and oysters in the Chesapeake Bay, and a number of commercial fish species. On the other hand, it has been argued that hunting and fishing is not responsible per se for drastic declines in certain fish and game species. Rather, the absence of well specified and enforced private property rights (res nullis) precipitates tragedies of the commons (Hardin, 1968). Res nullis to fish and game are defined implicitly as "first in time, first in use," meaning that each fisherman or hunter has a strong private incentive to catch/kill early and often, before depletion by others. Since everyone has the same incentives, overexploitation of the resource is the inevitable result. As Hardin put it: There in lies the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit--in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in freedom of the commons. The tragedy of the commons can be overcome by assignment of private property rights to fish and game. In the United State, state governments claim ownership of fish and wild game species and manage the populations by restricting the number of licenses issued, the length of the hunting/fishing season, and/or the legally permitted take. It might be argued that the adverse impacts of hunting and fishing could be avoided for the most part (except from poaching) if state governments simply eliminated hunting and fishing as legal activities. There certainly are those who would like to outlaw hunting and fishing as recreational and commercial activities. However, hunters and fishermen long have maintained that they actually promote the ecological well-being of the species they hunt because their license revenues fund research on species reproduction, health, management, habitat enhancement, and so on. Moreover, in the absence of hunting, certain formerly hunted species (e.g., possum, raccoon, deer) that thrive in the presence of mankind's altered habitat conditions reproduce at rates that, in turn, create ecological problems for a large number of other species, including man. For example, now-burgeoning populations of raccoons, foxes, coyotes, and possums decimate populations of songbirds (Putz, 2003). But there is an equally compelling reason to believe that hunting and fishing promote the ecological viability of game species: private landowners have an economic incentive to set aside and/or develop habitat conditions that game species favor. If they can demonstrate to prospective hunters and fishermen that desired game species are available on their property, private landowners can profit by selling hunting and/or fishing rights. …