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.
Highlights
Overexploitation is a major driver of endangerment for the majority of International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red-Listed vertebrates (Rosser and Mainka 2002, Maxwell et al 2016)
We found that recreation was ranked as the main force driving hunting in both the quantitative surveys and semistructured interviews in our rural study area in tropical Southwest China
We presented a novel questioning technique, exit scenarios, to measure how hypothetical reductions in game availability would affect the rate of hunting, and found that hunting activity in Xishuangbanna was surprisingly resilient to reductions in catch
Summary
Overexploitation is a major driver of endangerment for the majority of International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red-Listed vertebrates (Rosser and Mainka 2002, Maxwell et al 2016). The nonmaterial entertainment value of hunting—the thrill of the chase and social benefits provided by hunting—may be a prominent motivator for rural villagers in tropical countries (Bennett 2002, Loveridge et al 2006, Rao et al 2010, Velho and Laurance 2013, MacMillan and Nguyen 2014, Alfaro-Shigueto et al 2016). We distinguish this form of recreational hunting from previous descriptions of sport or trophy hunting. The recreational hunting described pertains to systems with weak to nonexistent governance and/or enforcement on hunting (El Bizri et al 2015)
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