Post by sansara66 on May 26, 2022 15:37:14 GMT
A stumbling block to successful wildlife entrepreneurship in the United States has been that wildlife itself is owned by the state, and harvests are strictly controlled by state agencies.Coupled with this is the fact that most hunters in the West associate hunting with public lands where access is free.Old traditions die hard, however, and hunters, having become accustomed to free hunting on both private and public domain, balk at paying for access.Indeed, they openly oppose introducing markets into wildlife allocation citing ’market hunting’ in the late nineteenth century as the cause of declining wildlife populations.By continually making it more difficult for landowners to profit from wildlife, encouraging open access to the animals, and pricing hunting licenses below their market value, these market opponents perpetuate equal access to an increasingly lower quality hunting experience.Moreover, by making it difficult for the landowner to profit from providing habitat, opponents of market hunting take away the crucial incentive recognized in 1930 by the American Game Policy Committee, chaired by Aldo Leopold.These entrepreneurs discovered how to control access and devise innovative contractual arrangements to capture a share of the hunting and fishing profits.When they are successful, ’the tragedy of the commons’ associated with wildlife management is mitigated.The results of a hunter survey conducted by Robert Davis of the University of Colorado are informative.Hunters who paid a fee for access to private land were more satisfied with the amount of game they saw, the reduced crowding, and even the ease of access.Comparing the quality of hunting experiences on public and private land revealed similar results.Hunters on public land saw less game, encountered more hunters, and had to work harder for access.From Africa to Colorado, markets are making their way into hunting because entrepreneurs are meeting a demand.In the process, both the hunters and the habitat owners profit.The nonhunter may think that the wildlife themselves are left out of the transaction.To be sure, it is the killing of animals that generates the profits, but it is also this killing that provides the incentive to people to preserve habitat and species.’The animal rights people want to save individual animals.Like entrepreneurs in conventional economic endeavors, wildlife entrepreneurs must understand the complexities of production and marketing.On the production side, wildlife entrepreneurs have been busy finding innovative ways in which wildlife can compete effectively with other traditional land uses, such as cattle ranching or farming.By cutting back on the number of cattle grazing on his land, Lamprecht could produce more African wildlife.Entrepreneurship means that there will be a multitude of approaches to production.The approach taken by Angus Brown Safaris will not work for everyone.Gregg Simonds on the Deseret Ranch believed he did not have to give up cattle production to get more wildlife.By implementing a unique grazing rotation plan and utilizing the natural water supplies, he was able to increase both cattle and elk numbers on his ranch.As with other economic goods and services, however, raw inputs often require entrepreneurial talent to transform them into products valued highly by consumers.Wildlife habitat is the raw input being produced by Angus Brown Safaris and Deseret Ranch, but the final product is a unique hunting experience.Throughout Montana are many ranches with the same inputs, but it takes entrepreneurship to market these assets to consumers.The Flynn brothers enjoy higher returns from their ranch because of their entrepreneurship.This kind of return gets the attention of landowners.Driven by budgets that depend on hunter satisfaction, some state fish and game departments are beginning to realize the importance of private land in the production process.In states such as New Mexico, California, and Colorado, public employees with vision in these agencies are instituting new programs that allow private landowners to capitalize on wildlife assets by granting them special permits and more flexibility in hunting regulations.Everyonehunters, landowners, wildlife managers, and even the wildlifewins when this entrepreneurial approach is used.Challenges remain for the wildlife entrepreneur, especially when the wildlife is migratory and crosses political boundaries.Entrepreneurs are experimenting with compensation schemes for landowners who allow predators such as wolves and grizzly bears access to their land.For example, Hank Fischer, the Northern Rockies director of Defenders of Wildlife, used his entrepreneurial talents to raise funds to compensate livestock owners for wolf depredation and to reward private landowners who allow wolves to raise pups on their property.In addition to production and marketing constraints, entrepreneurs face institutional constraints that often thwart their innovations.Laws that do not include water used to enhance instream flows as a ’beneficial use,’ requirements that private landowners must allow public access, and restrictions on the sale of wildlife for profit stymy entrepreneurship.Removing such constraints allows entrepreneurs to experiment with a whole host of wildlife management approaches.Data provided by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Nongame & Urban Wildlife Branch, Austin, Texas.Data provided by King Ranch Visitor Center, Kingsville, Texas.We estimate this on the basis of data in the ranch’s annual wildlife report.ReferencesBonner, Raymond.Peril and Hope for Africa’s Wildlife.Capstick, Peter Hathaway.Using Markets to Produce Big Game Hunting.In Wildlife in the Marketplace, ed.Wildlife Conservation as Wealth.Tragedy of the Commons.Game and Wild Life Conservation [1932].Report to the American Game Conference on an American Game Policy [1930].A Plea for Democracy in Sport [1919].DeseretDoing More With Less.Why Is the Preserve Concept Growing?Peggy Mullin Buehmer.American Hunting Heritage.Sports Afield, February.How Incentives Affect Resource Management on a Western Ranch.Presentation given at National Conference for Journalists, Big Sky, Montana, sponsored by the Political Economy Research Center, Sept.Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.Government Printing Office.In most places, the water barely covers the rocks.This is not a pretty sight for fishermen and other recreationists.Such low flows can mean that trout will die, stranded in pools deprived of oxygen, that there will not be enough water in which to float rafts, and that a picnic along the banks will not be aesthetically pleasing.Unfortunately, sights like this one are common on other streams as well.And just when the fishery was slowly recovering, another drought in 1994 stressed the fish population.The main reason there is so little water at times in these rivers is that farmers divert most of the flow for irrigation.Under water law in the West, farmers have secure rights to the water used in agricultural production.Agricultural uses account for approximately 85 percent of western water withdrawals, leaving urban, industrial, and environmental interests to fight over the remainder.Inefficient water use is not confined to agriculture.Urban users who pay low prices for their water plant green lawns in desert cities, let faucets drip continuously, and have antiquated distribution systems that leak badly.Losses from these distribution systems as high as 40 percent are commonplace.In this setting, water wars often erupt, with environmentalists leading the charge.Environmentalists argue that the water belongs to the people, with the states acting as trustees of the asset.Using the public trust doctrine, a legal doctrine previously applied mainly to navigation questions, the coalition contended that California had an obligation as trustee of the environment to protect Mono Lake and that it was remiss in allowing Los Angeles to divert so much water that Mono Lake’s ecosystem was threatened.Needless to say, the legal battle was long and acrimonious, but, as we shall see, environmental entrepreneurship played a role in the ultimate resolution of the dispute.Recreationists seeking public access to streams used similar tactics in Montana.Under the guise of the public trust doctrine, they argued that the water belonged to the citizens of the state and, therefore, private landowners could not deny access for floating and fishing.Fearing that the camel’s nose was under the tent and the next step would be to halt irrigation diversions, farmers fought hard.Again, the legal battles were acrimonious.Finally, the legislature waded in with compromise legislation that provided limited public access.For them, secure and transferable water rights are the key to balancing traditional consumption with environmental amenities.For many years, Willey had been laying the foundation for water marketing ideas with solid research documenting the potential gains from trade among farmers, municipalities, and environmentalists.These two were veterans in the water marketing debate.They worked hard to defeat the controversial Peripheral Canal in 1982, a project that would have spent millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to divert water from northern to southern California.Their main argument was that the project did not make economic or environmental sense.?’