For over 8 years I taught a "principles" course in two universities. I attended such courses taught by 5 professors and corresponded with others, sharing some notes. During this same period the literature of wildlife management and to a systems approach to education has grown very extensive. The arguments for such an approach are successfully and abundantly made, but the evidence for applications are sparse and halting. The following list of the educational objectives are presented as a pattern for initiating a systems approach to teaching wildlife management but equally as important, it is presented to raise the question: what are the principles of wildlife management?

A principle is very hard to define. I suspect the concept of what one is is the same in most fields. I do not know whether a nominal principle in one field can be one in another field. I prefer to think they cannot be, i.e., we may list a principle discovered by fisheries people, say it operates within wildlife as well, but it is not our principle. I desperately desire to know the principles that are unique to, solely used within, or discovered within wildlife management. I think there are very few, if any. Perhaps more than most other fields, it is dependent and synthetic. If so, what are the synthetic principles? Feedback will be needed.

A minor reason for concentrating attention on principles is for designing "principles" courses. An introductory course (if that is where "principles" are best taught (which is worth debating in light of finding in educational research)) cannot achieve all objectives. One course does not make an expert. Principles are difficult to define. A serious effort must be exerted to exclude concepts not specifically requisite to wildlife management, to reduce class time and costs, and to reduce boring and functionless redundancy. Instructional methods for presenting or encouraging student to discover vary with class structure, size, budget, available technology, teacher's talents and interest, teaching assistants, curriculum, and physical setting.

I wrote a book on the principles, fundamental work concepts, in 1978. I thought it would be easy to do. I studied old class notes, the three textbooks then available, and other sources and I found that there were few of them! I have continued the search and it has been difficult. I pondered: perhaps the criteria were too stringent. I proposed that a principle of wildlife management should be unique to wildlife management and used almost totally within that activity. If it is not, then it must be a principle of another field or very general and not likely to be very useful (and not worth spending much time in presenting it for practical students). I wanted principles that made my field distinctive. How was wildlife management different? Significant differences were sought, just as we would seek and judge significant differences in out experiments. I faced the premise, as I now challenge users of this web site to do: If a field of study and work has no principles that are significantly different from other fields, then there is no field.

I propose that the apparent shortage of principles creates a problem in taxonomy, in semantics, and perhaps in a topic similar to that in statistics of discriminant analysis. If we cannot define ourselves and state our principles, then we are nothing (or everything) and almost irrelevant. Throughout the world there are vast differences in what is meant by or assumed to be wildlife management. In some biology programs there are people who study animals in the wild. Elsewhere, there are entire programs, groups of people, that study the biology of wild animals (presuming " wild" differences. Others study wild animal habitats. Elsewhere, others study decision making, economics, operations research, remote sensing, and the social dimensions of managing a wild animal resource. Elsewhere, people do not study them at all. They work with them. They generally try to increase their abundance. Some try to reduce pests and predators. Others tend traumatized and ill individuals. Others try to preserve the last of a species in a zoo.

Here I do not attempt to judge the appropriateness of any of these activities Great good can come from them all. The question herein is what is wildlife management, what is it not, and what might it become, as judged by its written principles? Not an object like a book or a rock, wildlife management is a thing to be decided. It is a thing for which we develop word models. We may or disagree. We may see more or less of the thing discussed. We may wish to cut off parts or add others. It is important that we exchange our view as we look at the same thing, for there are several definitions and little debate. Some people include fish as wild animals, some exclude sociological and economic aspects of study and work. Few care whether wild plants are included.

The previous definitionreflects that management involves the control and manipulation of systems to achieve certain ends. Wildlife can be studied and knowledge about them (from any source) is needed for decisions, but it is not an "...ology", it can include science but most inputs to decisions made are easily identified as produced by the recognized sciences of botany, zoology, ecology, etc. Perhaps calling it a science allows it to be legitimate within universities; perhaps respect is gained nominally. I suspect greater respect will be gained over the longrun by careful attention to the definition, discrimination, and taxonomic clarity and truthfulness.

In the definition, the limits to wild animals are not specified. I believe all should be included, from protozoa to marine mammals, but the reasonable limits should be: those for which several cost-effective techniques are known, that if applied could cause the population to change significantly in the desired, predictable amounts. This reduces the populations that may now be involved significantly! The list would be expected to increase.

In the same way that it ignores or excludes wild crop pest insects or wild mosquitoes in the domain of people with public health interests, the term excludes managing trees and tree dominated communities when they are well managed. Not the forester or the range manager (but of course the advisor to them), just who is the wildlife manager?

Note the emphasis on decision making in the definition. Many people can tend animals, mow grass, build houses, create forage areas. Many are expert observers and scholars. The professional university-educated wildlife manager can do these things too, but the important work, the real evidence for management is in decisions made about how to manipulate things so that people benefit. If they do not benefit significantly more as a result of the manager's work than before such work, then management has not taken place. The person's activities are misdirected, the same as mere random variation, noise in the system.

Also note that costs are not mentioned. These are assumed to be included with "active objectives" In some cases such as with an endangered species, costs may be almost of no concern. In other cases, losses and risks from wildlife are so great that direct costs are an insignificant part of the manager's decision. To most cases, maximum expected present net worth or maximizing a modern benefit-to-cost ratio is the manager's criterion.

A stringent definition cuts mightily into the number of principles or operational concepts which are those of wildlife management, ones we might call our own. I do not suggest objectives or ethical standards as "principles" only knowledge bases of action. The following are the principles which I think meet my criteria:

1. Wildlife is a resource, thus objectives associated with it are expressed in terms of human benefits. These benefits are of many types and dimensions, both positive and negative, and may change with time, space, and sub-populations of humans. They differ by species and frequently have no monetary or commodity units of expression.

2. Wildlife resources can he created more frequently than in any other natural resource field. A group of people being taught how to identify a particular forest bird has had a resource created for them. The unknown and usually unseen thing, a resource is as real as a newly discovered layer of coal.

3. Animals and plants have different values. A species has no particular value until it is known by people. Until then, they fall into a nebulous class of "wild things." Value is related to perceived abundance and utility. Value of a very rare species may be very high; value of the sight of a vast flock of ducks can also be very great. Values are curvilinear and can be affected by the manager.

4. Populations, not individuals, are the managerial unit.

5. Populations may be increased, decrease, or stabilized, but benefits are only poorly correlated with abundance or density. The managerial emphasis is on benefits (a) and, in some cases, costs (C). Discounted-to-the-present net expected value is a useful measure of benefits and costs for our field, but this economic expression is widely used in other fields. Unlike other fields, we may use different units for benefits than for costs and thus we may seek to maximize a modified benefit-to-cost ratio (not merely achieve a ratio greater than 1.0).

6. When populations or users become excessively abundant, the potential benefits from the resource may decline. More is not always better.

7. Wildlife resource benefits can be gained by humans. These gains can be changed by managers. The wildlife resource benefits are more complex than for any other resource and have minimum dimensions of:

1. multiple objectives,
2. units of each objective demanded,
3. relative importance or value,
4. probability of occurrence or its alternative (l.0 - risk),
5. variety, and
6. substitutability.

9. Managers manipulate the energy budgets of animal populations to achieve desired population abundance. Animals are a function of many factors, chief among which is their ability to achieve a positive energy balance for survival, energy conservation, and reproduction. Managers can simultaneously provide energy, reduce costs of foraging or energy intake, and reduce drains or losses.

10. Stage of succession or transition in communities can be manipulated to achieve the animals or plants associated with the stage. Succession is a concept of ecology and the relations of plants and animals to each stage (or age) is known from botany and ecology. The manager's principle is that the desired stage can be gotten and held by direct involvement such as by using fertilizers, irrigation, thinning, planting, grazing, tree harvests, controlled fires, and other techniques.

11. Density of animals and plants in a stage can be influenced by changing the size of a homogeneous area perceptibly different from adjacent areas (e.g., a forest stand, a rangeland shrub community) and the proximity of all parts of the area to an edge. When stands become very small, they no longer provide the microclimate forage base, or other requirements for certain species. By changing the shape of areas the edge-to-area ratio can be changed. For some species, a maximum edge-to-area ratio is desired. A circular area provides the minimum.

12. Large land units such as forest stands and crop fields can be arranged to provide corners. Places where three or more units join. Like edges, these corners are valuable for some species, irrelevant to others.

13. Certain species need very large areas which provide little or no disturbance by people (which would result in energy drains from their disturbance) and diverse long-term life requirements. The manager may meet these needs by legislating land use such as for refuges, parks, and wilderness areas.

14. Animals and plants may be moved from one area or population to another. Transplanting is usually more effective than stocking, but population size, behavior. environmental conditions, and use rates or disturbance influence the success of such movements. Introducing animals or plants new to an area must be done, if at all, with extreme care and knowledge of the risks involved.

15. Animals and plants can be harvested with care. Once a minimum number has been assured (based on genetic, ecological function, and economic criteria), then the population may be manipulated to achieve desired levels and associated benefits.

16. Harvests are one way to assure desired sex ratios, age structure, animal size, density, overall abundance, and rates of change.

17. Hunting is one means to achieve a desired harvest but the human benefits from hunts are poorly correlated with harvest numbers. Benefits are strongly correlated with pre-hunt planning and experiences, and social interactions. Benefits of the hunt are likewise positively correlated with the magnitude of difference between the hunt and daily life, exercise gained, pleasant weather conditions, special observations, and post-hunt remembrances and tales.

18. Where there is ample cover and normal or controlled gun hunting, populations can rarely be over-harvested because harvest per unit of hunting effort declines and hunting stops before a population reaches a non-replacement level.

19. Wildlife laws exist and are needed to protect the resource, disperse use, allow users equal opportunity to the resource, protect land owners end land holders, and assure income to the agency where licenses or use fees are charged.

20. A wildlife law system is seeded with careful development of essential law, education, prevention, deterrence, apprehension, efficient and effective court processes, and significant penalties to reduce future violations, and rewards for desirable behaviors. Diverse strategies within a total system are essential because of the dispersed and non-random nature of the violations.

21. The wildlife manager is a decision maker, seeking to increase and reduce costs for a client or the public. Typically related to hunting, trapping, and animal watching, management for such activities is narrow and matches poorly with the potentials of the resource for supplying food, recreation, tourism, education, pharmaceuticals, furs, functional enhancement of the ecosystem, and other benefits. Similarly, wildlife may cause human losses e.g., disease) and costs, Reducing these is fully as important as increasing yields.

There may be other principles but they are few. The above 20 suggest a pattern or style and I request readers to articulate others that are not strongly within someone else's field of study and interest.

Suggestion Box I'm listening. Email RHGiles at RuralSystem dot com

In retrospect, perhaps the search is meaningless for why do we need identity? Perhaps what we went eventually is the fundamental concept of the university, a oneness, in which we all work together to improve all of the land and water resources of the world for all people. That is too grand an idea. We simply need principles!