A literature review of legal hunting practices

Abstract

Humans have always hunted for food, recreation, sport or cultural reasons. However, legal hunting practices are increasingly being challenged on sustainability and animal welfare grounds, even if hunting can contribute to reach biodiversity objectives (Di Minin et al. 2016). Previous reviews have especially focused on illegal hunting (Benítez-López et al. 2016). In order to collect information on the sustainability of hunting we reviewed the peer-reviewed English language literature on legal hunting. We used 26 hunting related terms to search for all the literature on legal hunting on WebofScience. We focused on terrestrial ecosystems and species, therefore excluding fishing and whaling. The original search resulted in 2 985 papers. These were screened, based on title and abstract, for papers not addressing legal hunting. After this the remaining 1 608 papers were read through to insure systematic inclusion in the database. We further excluded papers that did not specifically study the impact of hunting on species populations, management, conservation, economics, socio-cultural values, animal welfare, or other sustainability related issues. The final review consisted of 1200 articles published between 1953 and January 2018. Our preliminary results highlight the spatial and temporal patterns of legal hunting in English scientific research and present which species the studies have mainly focused on, as well as the socio-ecological, management, governance and animal welfare implications of legal hunting. Overall, we found that there were fewer papers that covered the overall sustainability, ecological, and socio-economic impacts of legal hunting. Some species were studied extensively in North America, also the location with most studies. Other locations highlighted by the number of studies are some parts of Europe and southern Africa. Our review highlights gaps in research that should be filled by future research and provide evidence in supporting conservation decision making.

References:

1. Benítez-López, A., Alkemade, R., Schipper, A., Ingram, D., Verweij, P., Eikelboom, J., Huijbregts, M., 2017. The Impact of Hunting on Tropical Mammal and Bird Populations. Science, 356:6334, pp. 180-183.

2. Di Minin, E., Leader-Williams, N., Bradshaw, C., 2016. Banning Trophy Hunting Will Exacerbate Biodiversity Loss. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 31:2, pp. 99-102.