Abstract
Although predation bounty programs (rewards offered for capturing or killing an animal) ended more than 40 years ago in Canada, they were reintroduced in Alberta in 2007 by hunting, trapping, and farming organizations, municipalities and counties, and in 2009 in Saskatchewan, by municipal and provincial governments and the Saskatchewan Cattlemen’s Association. Bounty hunters use inhumane and non-selective killing methods such as shooting animals in non-vital regions, and killing neck snares and strychnine poisoning, which cause suffering and delayed deaths. They are unselective, and kill many non-target species, some of them at risk. Predator bounty programs have been found to be ineffective by wildlife professionals, and they use killing methods that cause needless suffering and jeopardize wildlife conservation programs. Our analysis therefore indicates that government agencies should not permit the implementation of bounty programs. Accordingly, they must develop conservation programs that will minimize wildlife-human conflicts, prevent the unnecessary and inhumane killing of animals, and ensure the persistence of all wildlife species.
Highlights
Bounties were commonly used throughout Europe from the 17th to 20th Century to control terrestrial predators, e.g., wolves (Canis lupus) [1], red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) [2,3], brown bears (Ursus arctos) [4,5], lynx (Lynx lynx) [6], otters (Lutra lutra) [7], pine martens (Martes martes) [6], and others
We show that bounties
The distribution of bounty programs in Alberta was determined through interviews with municipality and county officials, representatives of the provincial government, hunter and trapper associations, and with articles published in local newspapers
Summary
Bounties (rewards offered for capturing or killing animals) were commonly used throughout Europe from the 17th to 20th Century to control terrestrial predators, e.g., wolves (Canis lupus) [1], red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) [2,3], brown bears (Ursus arctos) [4,5], lynx (Lynx lynx) [6], otters (Lutra lutra) [7], pine martens (Martes martes) [6], and others. Bounties were implemented in North America since European settlement. Every American state or territory offered bounties at various times from the 1700s to the 1900s [8,9]. Five states still had wolf bounties on the legislative records as late as 1971 [10]. In Canada, wolf bounties occurred in the early 1700s [11], the first documented bounty was in Upper Canada (Ontario) in 1793 [12,13]. By 1900, all Canadian provinces with wolves had bounties [14]. Bounties started in 1878 in Manitoba, and 1899 in Saskatchewan and Alberta [15,16], and in 1900 in British Columbia. In Quebec and Ontario, bounties stopped in the early
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