Revisiting Evidence for Sustainability of Bushmeat Hunting in West Africa |
|
|---|---|
| Author | |
| Waite, T. A | |
| Year | |
| 2007 | |
| Secondary Title | |
| Environmental Management | |
| Volume | |
| 40 | |
| Pages | |
| 476-480 | |
| Abstract | |
| Bushmeat hunting, a key source of dietary protein, has been implicated as a major extinction threat to tropical vertebrate species in West Africa. Ideally, any such hunting of wild species should be done sustainably, with off-take levels low enough to ensure viability of harvested species. Recent work purports to show that a mature bushmeat market in a major city in Ghana operates sus- tainably after depletion of vulnerable, slow-reproducing species (Cowlishaw and others 2005). I revisit two aspects of this work. First, I retest the prediction that larger species are transported to the market from greater distances, as expected if overexploitation depletes large species close to the city. Cowlishaw and others failed to find a significantly positive relationship between species-specific body mass and distance between capture site and the market. How- ever, my reanalysis provides evidence for a positive rela- tionship after all, consistent with unsustainable harvesting. In particular, ungulate species were harvested significantly farther from the market than smaller-bodied rodent species. Second, I caution that just because species ‘‘persist’’ in the marketplace in no way implies that they can withstand hunting pressure elsewhere and so should be of little con- cern to conservationists. I reveal that such species, despite their high intrinsic rates of population growth, are not ro- bust elsewhere. Several of them have disappeared from a network of protected areas in Ghana (Brashares and others 2001). I show that faster-reproducing species are not ne- cessarily more likely to persist in protected areas. The mere presence of fast-reproducing species in a mature bushmeat market should not be construed as generalizable robustness; criteria for ecological sustainability should ensure viability; and harvested species should be robust, not highly prone to extinction, in protected areas. | |
| DOI | |
| 10.1007/s00267-006-0207-9 | |
Bushmeat Database
The searchable Bushmeat Database contains more than 700 citations, including peer-reviewed journal articles, books and book chapters, technical papers, reports and conference proceedings. Citations include direct DOI-based links to the articles on the original journal or publisher’s website. To see the data displayed in a visual format, visit the Bushmeat Data Map.
