Does Science Serve the Wildlife Industry? A Response to the de Bruynet al. Critique of Von Brandis & Reilly (2008)

Abstract

We measured 5300 trophies according to the SCI technique. However, a further 4300 Roland Ward measured trophies were kindly made available to us. We wished to combine (not compare) these two data sets in order to augment our existing database. The two measurement techniques employ different measurements in the calculation of their 'total scores' and cannot be combined using these values. However, both measuring techniques employ the measurement of the 'longest horn' in their total scores and given the positive product moment correlation coefficients between the longest horn measurements and the total score of both measurement techniques (see Table 1), we extracted only the longest-horn values and used these in our analysis of simple and spiral horned animals. For blue wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus) and black wildebeest (Connochaetes gnou) an index of trophy quality was deduced (individual trophy measurement divided by mean trophy quality for that species in that country) since there was no common measurement between the techniques. When no significant spatiotemporal variation was found for the wildebeest species, the SCI and Rowland Ward databases were analysed independently. Again, no significant variation was found.