The pleasure of pursuit: recreational hunters in rural Southwest China exhibit low exit rates in response to declining catch
Chang, Charlotte H., Barnes, Michele L., Frye, Margaret, Zhang, Mingxia, Quan, Rui-Chang, Reisman, Leah M.G., Levin, Simon A., and Wilcove, David S. (2017) The pleasure of pursuit: recreational hunters in rural Southwest China exhibit low exit rates in response to declining catch. Ecology and Society, 22 (1). 43.
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Abstract
Hunting is one of the greatest threats to tropical vertebrates. Examining why people hunt is crucial to identifying policy levers to prevent excessive hunting. Overhunting is particularly relevant in Southeast Asia, where a high proportion of mammals and birds are globally threatened. We interviewed hunters in Southwest China to examine their social behavior, motivations, and responses to changes in wildlife abundance. Respondents viewed hunting as a form of recreation, not as an economic livelihood, and reported that they would not stop hunting in response to marked declines in expected catch. Even in scenarios where the expected catch was limited to minimal quantities of small, low-price songbirds, up to 36.7% of respondents said they would still continue to hunt. Recreational hunting may be a prominent driver for continued hunting in increasingly defaunated landscapes; this motivation for hunting and its implications for the ecological consequences of hunting have been understudied relative to subsistence and profit hunting. The combination of a preference for larger over smaller game, reluctance to quit hunting, and weak enforcement of laws may lead to hunting-down-the-web outcomes in Southwest China.
| Item ID: | 50672 |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1708-3087 |
| Keywords: | harvesting, hunting, interviews, management, natural resource governance |
| Additional Information: | Copyright © 2017 by the author(s). Published here under license by The Resilience Alliance. This article is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt the work for noncommercial purposes provided the original author and source are credited, you indicate whether any changes were made, and you include a link to the license. Go to the pdf version of this article |
| Funders: | National Science Foundation (NSF), Princeton University Center for Health and Wellbeing, Explorers Club, Burnand- Partridge Foundation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), High Meadows Foundation |
| Projects and Grants: | NSF DEB-1501552, USFWS #0106.15.048577 |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Sep 2017 10:58 |
| FoR Codes: | 41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4104 Environmental management > 410407 Wildlife and habitat management @ 50% 41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4104 Environmental management > 410404 Environmental management @ 20% 44 HUMAN SOCIETY > 4401 Anthropology > 440107 Social and cultural anthropology @ 30% |
| SEO Codes: | 96 ENVIRONMENT > 9605 Ecosystem Assessment and Management > 960505 Ecosystem Assessment and Management of Forest and Woodlands Environments @ 50% 97 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 970105 Expanding Knowledge in the Environmental Sciences @ 25% 95 CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING > 9599 Other Cultural Understanding > 959999 Cultural Understanding not elsewhere classified @ 25% |
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