The Political Economy of Modern Wildlife Management: How Commercialization Could Reduce Game Overabundance.

• Author: Wright, Robert E.

Many North Americans wrongly believe that killing and selling some of the individual members of a wild species will lead inexorably to species extinction because of stories told them about bison and passenger pigeons. (1) In fact, commercialization could maximize the long-term equilibrium number of game species or, less ambitiously, help wildlife managers to better balance the number of game animals with extant habitat and the sometimes conflicting interests of various human constituencies, including agriculturalists, ecotourists, homeowners, hunters, and motorists. To understand how killing and selling can save wild species requires a more extensive knowledge of both economics and ecology than most policy makers and academics possess. This article provides a bare-bones synthesis from the too-often-neglected interdisciplinary perspective afforded by economic history. Specialists and others eager for additional details about the natural histories of major species and their management, along with more detailed policy suggestions, are encouraged to consult Wright 2020. Nevertheless, pains have been taken here to cite many of the most important primary and secondary sources for the convenience of readers.

Biases against Using Markets to Restore Ecological Equilibrium

The bias against commercialization is not obviously wrong on its face, but anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of agriculture, anthropology, ecology, economics, or history should immediately sense it cannot be the entire story. After all, the world's most successful birds and mammals in terms of reproductive success are domesticates, such as cattle and chickens, which suggests that they gain more from human protection than they give up by being consumed by humans (Budiansky 1992). Moreover, humans compete against other predators for prey, and all three groups--humans, wild predators, and prey--lived in long-term equilibrium with each other for untold eons.

Many blame technology and population growth for the human ability to cause specie extinction, but thousands of years ago humans already possessed the tools (fire and communication skills) needed to kill scores of mammoth and other large mammals in one short hunting excursion. Yet human responsibility for the disappearance of megafauna remains intensely debated (Wheat, Malde, and Leopold 1972; Baden, Stroup, and Thurman 1981; Fiedel 2001; Kay and Simmons 2002; Koch and Barnosky 2006; Nagaoka, Rick, and Wolverton 2018). For most prey species, habitat, not predation pressure, constitutes the key constraint on population density and range. Habitat quantity and quality are mostly a function of climate and human economic activity, but animals often react to human incursions in surprising ways. Many species, from bats to rats, have learned to live within human structures, and even larger animals, such as deer, foxes, moose, mountain lions, pigeons, raccoons, and squirrels, have become habituated to humans in urban settings (Budiansky 1992, 45-52; Animals and Society Institute 2020).

Not all species cohabit easily with humans, however, and many with restricted ranges have succumbed to agricultural or urban development. Biological characteristics constant, those species least valuable to humans--either because they are not intrinsically economically valuable or because they remain common-pool resources unowned by anyone until harvested--are the most vulnerable to extinction. People interested in saving species, therefore, would do well to ensure that the wild things they want to conserve constitute economic goods rather than bads. (2) Unfortunately, certain provisions of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973 render biologically marginal species bads in the eyes of property owners facing ESA restrictions on their land use (Seasholes 2014).

The North American Wildlife Conservation Model (NAWCM), by contrast, partially turns game animals into economic goods. Unlike the ESA, the NAWCM is not a single piece of federal legislation but rather an organic set of international, national, and state wildlife policies developed piecemeal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to declining wild-game populations. Not until the 1990s did scholars explicate the model, the canonical version of which contains seven interrelated policies, sometimes referred to as the "Seven Sisters" (Prukop and Regan 2005 , 374; Organ, Decker, and Lama 2016, 10-12; Feldpausch-Parker, Parker, and Vidon 2017, 33-35):

1. The state holds wildlife as a trustee for the people, a.k.a. the public-trust doctrine.

2. Markets for wildlife, especially game meat, must be banned or heavily restricted.

3. Allocation of surplus wildlife occurs according to law.

4. Wildlife can be killed only for legitimate purposes, such as food or for.

5. Wildlife is an international resource, so the wildlife management of migratory waterfowl, mammals, and marine life must be coordinated internationally.

6. Science, not politics, should drive wildlife-management decisions (scientific wildlife management).

7. Hunting must be democratic.

Since the evolution of the NAWCM, no major game species has gone extinct, and several now suffer from overpopulation in parts of their ranges. (3) Few doubt the conservation power of the model, but, contrary to common understanding, the key to the model's success is the value it places on wild game, not its ban on the commercialization of wild-game meat, which, as explained in the next section, played an important role only in the transition that occurred around the turn of the twentieth century from the traditional common-pool era to the modern public-trust-doctrine period (Anderson 1998, 259; Peterson, Peterson, and Peterson 2016, 430).

Reasons Why the NAWCM Succeeded

Before the North American Wildlife Conservation Model, a common-pool problem or "tragedy of the commons" pressured many of North America's wild-game species, the total populations and ranges of which were shrinking not due to improved hunting technologies or increased human population per se but because everyone had an incentive to kill and consume them before somebody else did. As Elinor Ostrom (1990, 1992) explains, private, public, or club entities (individuals, governments, associations) control access to resources except those still considered part of the commons, which belong to nobody in particular until specific individuals or groups harvest or consume them.

Because nobody controlled access to valuable wild animals until they were harvested, North Americans had incentives to kill as many as they could, whenever and however they could, in order to obtain ownership of them before others did. They measured their harvests in the hundreds or thousands of animals and even by the ton. Their ancestors had come to the New World to exercise their liberty, part of which meant freeing themselves from harsh European game and trespass laws. Hunters asserted they could traverse and even camp on private land without permission whenever in search of their God-given quarry, further exacerbating the common-pool problem by leaving prey with no safe refuge (Lueck 1995, 3; Smalley 2016, 308-9).

Modern rifles increased take rates, but the percentage of hunters within the population fell over the course of the nineteenth century, so the real problem was the fact that North Americans believed they had a natural right to shoot any wild animal on sight for any reason, including to sell the animal's antlers, bones, claws, feathers, hides, teeth, and especially flesh in the continent's ubiquitous wildlife markets. Commercial "pot" hunters supplied those markets and the fancy hotel restaurant trade, while increasing numbers of urban men turned to hunting for the "sport" rather than the protein, which was increasingly cheap due to agricultural-efficiency improvements (Olmstead and Rhode 2008). Tensions between commercial and sport hunters mounted over time, making it difficult to enforce hunting regulations as everyone competed to harvest game animals such as deer, moose, and wapiti before others did (Eddy 1924).

Entrepreneurial innovation helped to break the impasse as some pot hunters became guides and outfitters, earning a living by helping sport hunters to find their quarry instead of by killing anything that moved. At the same time, agriculturalists began to supply high-end hotels, restaurants, and clothiers with farmed furbearers, deer, ducks, geese, and turkeys that proved cheaper, more uniform in size and taste, and safer to eat (no lead shot) (Wright 2020).

State officials then began to enforce seasons and to ban certain hunting techniques, such as night hunting with lights, that made it cheap/easy to harvest animals. They paid "game wardens" out of license fees, a type of use tax, rather than from general revenues, which cloistered wildlife managers from politics to a large extent. With the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 and the Dingell-Johnson Act of 1950, the federal government also effectively created a use tax by earmarking excise taxes on outdoor equipment (ammunition, guns, fishing rods, etc.) only for wildlife-conservation purposes (Lueck 1995, 4).

More-effective enforcement of trespass laws also helped by raising costs for hunters accustomed to treating the entire countryside, including private property, as a commons (Sawers 2015). In addition, Geer v. Connecticut (161 U.S. 519 [1896]) helped to establish the notion that even if the government does not technically "own" wildlife, it is their steward, thereby endowing states with a credible property right that helped to convince sport and commercial hunters that states were serious about enforcing new harvest regulations.

Policy makers and the public also mistakenly but understandably believed that human population growth combined with commercial hunting per se, rather than habitat loss and total mortality, was the root cause of declining game numbers. So in the Lacey Act of 1900, the...