Poaching

Poaching is the stealing of game or fish from private property or from a place where shooting, trapping or fishing rights are reserved. Until the twentieth century, most poaching was subsistence hunting or fishing to augment scanty diets. Today, poaching is usually committed for sport or profit.

The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that illegal trade in U.S. wildlife generates $200 million per year, a hefty slice of a $1.5 billion worldwide market. Big game animals are shot as trophies, and animal parts such as bear gallbladders are sold for "medicinal" purposes--usually as tonics to enhance male virility. Poaching also attracts organized crime because wildlife crime sentences, if tendered, tend to be lenient and probation requirements are difficult to enforce.

Poaching has a long history in this country: spotlighting a deer at night or shooting a duck in the family pond for dinner have long been a part of rural life. Today, despite a 94 percent conviction rate for those caught, poachers feed a demand for wildlife on both domestic and global markets. They decapitate walruses for ivory tusks, net thousands of night-roosting robins for Cajun gumbo, and shoot anhingas nesting in the Everglades and raptors for decorative feathers. Wolves are tracked and shot from airplanes. Sturgeon and paddlefish are caught and killed for their caviar. Poaching poses a serious threat to wildlife because it kills off the biggest and best of a species' gene pool . A report by the Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that 3,600 threatened or endangered species receive little or no federal protection.

The extinction of the Labrador duck in the 1880s and the near extinction of a dozen other waterfowl species led to the U.S.-Canadian Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The enactment of kill limits and the ban on commercial market hunting helped populations of birds. The U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 makes it a crime for non-Native Americans to hunt or sell walruses, sea otters, seals and sea lions , and polar bears. And the Lacey Act, passed in 1990, makes it a federal crime to transport illegally taken wildlife across state lines.

The sale of bear parts is legal in some states, creating a convenient outlet for poachers. Since merchandise such as bear meat, galls, and paws is difficult to track, the poachers are fairly safe. Uniform regulations in all 50 states would create a more difficult environment for poachers to operate in and might lead to a decrease in poaching, especially of bears.

As economic and political instability increased in many developing countries, so did poaching. A global demand for ivory caused wholesale slaughter of elephants and rhinoceros. As the big male elephants disappeared, poachers turned to females, the primary caretakers of the young. To help stop the carnage of elephant and rhinoceros for their ivory, 105 nations party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) have agreed to ban the raw ivory trade. The ban has caused ivory prices to plummet to pre-1970s levels, making poaching much less attractive. In Zimbabwe, game wardens now also have orders to shoot on sight poachers who menace the rare black rhino.

See also Grizzly bear

[Linda Rehkopf ]

RESOURCES

BOOKS

Chadwick, D. H. Fate of the Elephant. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992.

PERIODICALS

Hyman, R. "Check the Fine Print, Mate." International Wildlife 23 (January-February 1993): 22–5.

Manry, D., and U. Hirsch. "Cliff-hanger in Morocco." International Wildlife 23 (March-April 1993): 34–7.

Poten, C. J. "A Shameful Harvest." National Geographic 180 (September 1991): 106–132.