Abstract
The question of whether using wildlife is good or bad for conservation can never be answered with an unqualified yes or no. It is not a yes/no sort of question. But to oppose all commercial use of wildlife is to close off options for conservation where and when the protected area strategy fails. It will be concluded here that all options must be kept open and we must develop a battery of questions by which the pros and cons of any particular case can be assessed. In other words, we need to be able to recognize and predict the circumstances under which utilization can be of long-term benefit to conservation. There are a great many factors to be taken into account. Luxmore and Swanson (1992) ask the ‘critical analytical question’: ‘What are the characteristics of human intervention that render it a force for conservation rather than a force for conversion?’ But that question does not go far enough because the human interventions that might succeed with one species can be hopelessly wrong for another. Management strategies only make sense in relation to the characteristics of the targeted species.
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Bolton, M. (1997). Synthesis and conclusions. In: Bolton, M. (eds) Conservation and the Use of Wildlife Resources. Conservation Biology Series, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1445-2_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1445-2_15
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