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Those people who work with wild animal populations, their areas, and the users of these populations present an anachronism. They are enamored of the biological rules of nomenclature, the importance of priority, type specimens, dichotomous keys, evolutionary and successional trends, and hierarchy of many types. Yet they have named themselves (or allowed themselves to be named) in a way inconsistent with their biological science background. They have allowed university and other organizational patterns to go unchallenged, and have allowed their limited theoretical bases, definition, and key phrases to be undercut by the erosive forces of imprecision.
"Only semantics" is an expression of the intellectually lazy and an escape from the hard work of clear definitions that form the theoretical grounds of most science and modern management. Precision in definition appears to me now to be more important than working on the goals of accuracy, precision, and nonbias (Overton 1971) of much wildlife-related research. Only recently has it become clear to me that the field, profession, or discipline (I do not know the correct word) called "wildlife management" is built on semantic sand. I present the following analysis to explain some past difficulties of agencies and academia, to describe a situation of interest which may have parallels in other disciplines, to point to the need to rebuild a theoretical base, and to suggest alternatives.
Linnaeus is said to have made a profound contribution to botany when he made the monocot-dicot conceptual cut. At least he did not say "monocots and nonmonocots." The binary branches of the conceptual world are made up of the "something" and "everything else" pairs. We have allowed the nonconcept of nongame to invade the field. We have become a lost ball in the tall weeds of definition and pseudo-definition. The recent spate of wildlife text books provides students a grassy wetland in which to roam in search for their professional identity. The examples:
Giles (herein) "...making decisions and taking actions to manipulate the structure, dynamics, and relations of wild faunal and floral populations, their spaces, and people to achieve specified human objectives by means of the wildlife resource."
Giles no longer struggles to have flora included. He argues from pragmatism. The history of the field and the entrenched ideas prevent the inclusion from ever happening.
Peek (1986:3): "...the art of making the land produce wildlife."
Shaw (1985) and Gilbert and Dodds (1987) dodged the definition bullet.
Anderson (1985:3): "...the art and science of manipulating populations and habitats for the animals and for human benefit."
Robinson and Bolen (1978:2): "...the application of ecological knowledge to populations of vertebrate animals and their plant and animal associates in a manner that strikes a balance between the needs of those populations and the needs of people."
Giles (1978:4): "...the science and art of making decisions and taking actions to manipulate the structure, dynamics, and relations of populations, habitats, and people to achieve specific human objectives by means of the wildlife resource."
Giles (1969:1): "...the science and art of changing the characteristics and interactions of habitats, wild animal populations, and men in order to achieve specific human goals by means of the wildlife resource."
Specific definitions were not given in Allen (1962) or Dasmann (1964).
Trefethen (1964): "...wildlife management attempts to control populations of wild animals for benefit of society."
Snow et al.(1947) [prepared in 1941, printed 1947]: "...the art of making land and water produce optimum sustained annual crops or the best species of wildlife for use consistent with utilization of land and water for other purposes."
Leopold (1933): "Game management is the art of making land produce sustained annual crops of wild game for recreational use."
There are some people engaged in the professional and quasi-professional pursuits associated with wildlife who persist in emphasizing the biological dimension of the field. ("Field" is the most general, vague, nonspecific term I can select, and I use it purposely.) Of course, an animal is biological, but is not the topic of the work of wildlife people the resource and the set of animal populations that have value or disproduct? Is not their topic at least as much economical as biological? What do they do mostly? Do they work with animals or with lands? My opinion is that among those who seek actively and directly to change populations, more than 90 percent of their studies and actions are with forests, farms, grasslands, and wetlands, more with the sciences of agronomy, forestry, hydrology, and geology than with zoology. Who, if any one, might the people of the field be fooling or seeking to fool about their subject matter? Perhaps no one. Perhaps there is only an error in emphasis or simply carelessness. The emphasis is not on the wrong thing; any emphasis is wrong. Arguing importance of topics is akin to a biologist arguing that the heart is the most important organ. No knowledgeable biologist will make such a claim. The system, the total system, needs to be the emphasis. If not emphasized, then wildlife people must face up to a sensitivity analysis as might be conducted in some linear programming (Dykstra 1984) class exercise. The analysis would indicate which are the most influential variables and to which ones the system performance measures respond if changes are made ... and those to which it is unresponsive. I hypothesize that in more than 90 percent of the problems solved, the dominant decision variables will be labor, costs, primary production per unit area, access, and protection, not testicle weight or a population estimate (plus or minus 500 animals).
The wildlife field, in the bud of youth, may become victim of its own lack of definition, its own scant dynamic, and the international juggernaut of shifts from a Cartesian world view (with its accents on parts and elements) to a configuration world view with emphases on wholes and patterns.
In classes in elementary economics, it is learned that resource benefits are rarely linear and that there is agroup of concepts that usually show benefits per unit costs declining as a population increases past a point. ln particular species, the more animals, the more likely a pest status is to be reached. Counterintuitively, it is highly likely that more genuine resource benefits occur to society when a species is in a threatened condition (zone A in Fig. 21.1) than during much of the remainder of its expansion or decline.
A point from all of the above is that wildlife is a resource and that to manipulate it actively (i.e., to reduce, increase, or stabilize a performance measure associated with it (e.g., hours spent hunting)) there are many things that can be (and are) done and are done simultaneously to achieve from it many benefits. Fig. 21.1 indicates clearly that "more" is not "better" and resource managers' objectives are unlikely to be in all, or even in most cases, to maximize animal populations.
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Fig. 21.1. An hypothesis about the relationship of potential human benefits from a wild animal population in its perceived total abundance. Benefits may be relatively high even when populations are low or endangered (B). In a region (C), they are of only passing interest, but values increase (as at E) suggested in comments about vast herds or flocks. At F and G, excessive populations may cause damage. Note the same level of benefits (a) might be achieved at 4 very different population levels. The wildlife benefit-to-abundance curve is hardly linear. To see or experience the environment of a rare species can be thrilling, provide hours of secondary reflection and social disclosure, and hours of recreational activity in searching. Benefits per unit invested rarely occur at the maximum population, and at some level "enough is enough" and displeasure or damage occurs to a high proportion of people, perhaps to all, resulting in zero or negative net benefits. |
Of course I do not think this is the case, but I do think steps are needed to build a sound theoretical and conceptual underpinning to the work that wildlife resource managers do. That base is needed now, before any further encroachment of claims of "prior usage", and before another class of graduates invades the field with suboptimal concepts now frayed from over 50 years of misuse.
I do not think a theory can be created that encompasses all that currently exists or has wandered in under the conceptual umbrella called wildlife management. Society membership drive leaders to the contrary, I think there is a need to define this thing we do, and then to be more precise in doing it. It is perfectly all right for people to belong to a group; pay dues; support an organizational policy, building, and staff; make claims; "stand" for things; and enjoy whatever benefits may accrue. With or without an organization to bolster it, a body of knowledge only exists (and is nameable) when there is an essential core theory, a sine qua non, a fundamental ground.
I hold that this theory begins with a definition because we are not a fundamental measurable entity like a creature X that we have all learned to call a "deer." We are a nominal abstraction, like "heat."
We have difficulty with definition from the beginning of thought about the topic, for we cannot define wildlife. Some people include plants, other exclude them. The remainder do not know what to do with reptiles, amphibians, mollusks, crayfish, or insects. Fish constitute a continuing problem; are they wildlife?
We allowed our field to be bastardized by a fisheries commissioner when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was created. He inserted the word in last-minute legislative transaction. This action at the federal level has since logically implied that the two, fish and wildlife, are separate. Fish, legally, are not a sub-set of wildlife. Legal or not, when it comes to budgeting, exactly where the often-but-poorly-used term is proper, money for actions for fish are allocated separately from those largely for terrestrial animals.
It seems now that such a linguistic, biopolitical, educational, and recent "conservation biology" organizational mess exists that there is need for the wildlife interests to draw themselves to full statue and then, realizing a perfect or totally satisfactory solution is not now possible, and probably never will be, and given history, then to decide on who they are or want to be, and then build on that decision. Failing to do so, they will continue largely as a political entity, uncommitted, and be blown hither and yon by fad, law, pressure groups, and political whim. It is not a bad condition for organizations (note the success of politically serviceable, nebulous, nonphrases like "multiple-use", "sustained yield", and "ecosystem management"), and I can understand why those in groups would find the present vague condition satisfactory. However, it is not a condition on which to build the viable science or managerial system so badly needed by people and their faunal resource.
An analysis of similarity and parallelism between wildlife work and work in other fields can be instructive. There are parallels within fisheries and forestry circles which are familiar and especially relevant.
The Nominal Resource
In one field, forestry, there are trees. In another, animals. (I personally include all wild animal, plant, and other biotic populations as wild life but hypothesize that I am in the minority.)
There are types of trees and types of animals. Conifers and hardwoods are well known tree groups. Similarly wildlife is typed, e.g., waterfowl. There are overlapping types of trees; a type is for the convenience of a user and has little or no basis in biology. For example, there are hardwoods and softwoods, some hardwoods having softer wood (e.g., Tilia) than most softwoods. Those who work with trees have some of the same nominal problems as those who work with animals. The overlapping types of animals include game, furbearers, pest, urban wildlifeland endangered species. The raccoon, Procyon lotor, is an example of an animal that, depending on time and place, can be included in any of the five types. The naming of type is related to use, and is thus a resource concept, not necessarily one of biological characteristics.
Those doing forest work study trees under the topic of dendrology. Animal workers have much greater diversity than those who work with trees. Not only are there more species (e.g., within birds) than trees, but workers must study animals under ornithology, mammalogy, herpetology, malacology, and entomology. There remains debate over whether ichthyology is a primary topic (like mammalogy) of the work of people in the wildlife field, or whether it is only secondarily essential, like soils. (I prefer to include it, for I see no rational way to exclude it since I may manage for fish, either as game species to be harvested by anglers, or minnows to be observed to increase a life list, or forage species to be harvested by a predator, as a disease host to be harvested by anglers, or minnows to be observed to increase a life list, or forage species to be harvested by a predator, ar as a disease host to be reduced,or as a host of the young stage of fresh water mussels to be stabilized.) Wildlife is all plant and animal life, terrestrial and aquatic, found in generally unconstrained or undomesticated conditions.
The Meanings of Management
In forest work, there is the subject matter of silvics. Wildlife workers, to my knowledge, have no parallel subject. There may be similar diverse autecological or single-species studies, a variety of species monographs, surprisingly rarely sponsored by The Wildlife Society per se. The subject matter of silvics overlaps strongly that of silviculture, a subject the definition of which is not at all clear or on which there is little agreement. I take in this chapter a very narrow concept of it (for to some people, forestry = silviculture) and see it as the study of the design of forest age and structure. It is equivalent in wildlife circles to studies of population manipulation, an area of work that designs population structure in terms of species richness, sex ratios, age ratios, and abundance, and population dynamics in terms of mortality, survival, natality, and migration. I called it fauniculture (Minckler and Giles 1981).
The most difficult parallelism to reconcile is "forest management." This is only a small (but important) part of the total, enormously large, and complex activity called forestry. Wildlife workers have a Journal of Wildlife Management which, among parallels and by analogy, would be expected to address that part of the wildlife field called "management." It is clear that there is no term for wildlife workers that is equivalent to or parallel with forestry. What is the word that symbolizes the entire realm of science and management, physical entities and their users, processes, consumption, and appreciation of the tree-related resources? It is forestry! What is the parallel linguistic code, the word for the entire realm of study and description, analysis and prescription of how benefits will be produced for people from wild animals and plants? See Table 21.1. We struggle with a diminutive title. Our entire field of activity has a name the equivalent of one mere course title in an entire curriculum of activities and topics called, collectively, forestry.
Forest management deals with management science, the decision processes that are associated with the tree-based land system. Forestry includes much more than managing tree stands. It includes, for example, marketing, industrial and international topics, production, fire protection, etc., etc. There is no equivalent concept among wildlife workers. What is the equivalency? What is X in the following relationship:
Forestry / X = Forest Management / Faunal System Management
Wildlife management is not parallel with or similar to forest management. Wildlife management is more inclusive of subject matter and topics than forestry but uses a name equivalent to only one subject or specialty within it.
There are situations in which schools are named "forestry and wildlife." A grammar instructor would insist upon parallelism and suggest "trees and wildlife" or better: "forests and wildlife", and may suggest " forestry and X", X being the equivalent comprehensive system, like forestry, that treats of comprehensive animal-related resource systems. There is no word-equivalent for X. A wildlife worker would find unconscionable the phrasing of some group dealing with "big game and ducks." He or she would argue that there is bad hierarchy and nonparallelism and would insist on "big game and waterfowl." Wildlife workers have
Table 21.1. Parallels and nonparallels among terms within forestry, fisheries, and wildlife management areas.
| Level | Forestry | Fisheries | Wildlife Management |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Species of tree | Species of fish | species of bird, etc. |
| 2 | the oaks | the salmonids | the cervids |
| 3 | tree | fish | mammal bird? snake?etc.? |
| 4 | stand | school | herd, pack, flock |
| 5 | commercial hardwoods | game fish | game mammals |
| 6 | conifers | cold water fish | raptors |
| 7 | red oaks | cyprinids | hawks |
| 8 | forest stand | stock: game fish of a lake | furbearers of an area |
| 9 | conifer management | forest fish management | game management |
| 10 | logger management | angler management | hunter management |
| 11 | a forest | a lake | a refuge |
| 121 | a forest | a forest | a forest |
| 13 | hardwoods of a region | the coldwater fishery | songbirds of a region |
| 14 | a forester | a fisheries manager | a wildlifer |
| 15 | dendrology | icthyology | mammalogy (etc.) |
| 16 | Department or School of Forestry | Department or School of Fisheries | Department or School of X? |
| 17 | Forestry | Fisheries | X? |
allowed a forestry and wildlife nesting. The smaller nestling is tolerated; held and conditioned as subdominant in schools and agencies around the world.
Strangely, fisheries has not been so treated. There are no departments of trees and fish. There is fisheries, conceptually equivalent to forestry. The fishery is fully as complex and parallel, at least for some students, to the forest. There is the management subsystem of that field. Within fisheries groups there is equivalent misguided and excessive emphasis on biology as in the wildlife field, but there are strong parallels between topics in fisheries and forestry (ignoring the overlap of the forest fishery). There are trees and fish, the forest and the fishery, forestry and fisheries. The difference in meaning between the plural of fishery and the complex fish resource system seems to bother no one; it is usually clear from the context. The context rarely clarifies the intended meaning of the use of "wildlife management." Fish-, fishery-, and fisheries-management are course titles used in major universities suggesting, if not clarity of thought or nomenclatural sub set, a part of the larger array of purity, at least that "management" is courses within the fisheries system. If forestry treats of the tree-resource related system, and fisheries, the complex topic of all activities involving the fish-related resources of a region, then what is the word or phrase for the terrestrial-faunal-related system? See Table 2.
Table 2. The subject matter of rasking.
Organizations
In some universities and agencies, wildlife science is separated from other wildlife-related topics. This implies, regrettably, that management is not or cannot be science and that other topics not clearly "science" are inappropriate for teaching, research, or for being communicated to potential users. Where law enforcement, for example, can be studied, then it is science, but the connotations are unmistakable about law enforcement development, budgetary systems and allocation strategies, demonstrations, objective setting, political influences, and information systems.
The demarcation of "wildlife science" suggests there is something else more than science going on and that merely adding "and other topics" are not satisfactory or sufficient. The assumption is usually that the other is"wildlife management", a most awkward condition, because that is said by some to be the name for the entire field of activity, of which wildlife science is a part.
It is perfectly appropriate for groups to decide upon what aspects of a field they will concentrate. "Wildlife science" is a broad enough category to avoid most territorial skirmishes, but when it is placed in a title with connotations of parallelism such as "fisheries and wildlife science", it is wrong for many reasons -- from grammar to grant-gaining.
A discussion of the placement of wildlife-related instruction and research within the modern university is beyond the scope of this chapter. Such placement, like naming, does however, affect the mental model of the field. Rather than a topic placed on some lateral line showing all topics engaged in the university, the topic usually becomes displayed as subdiscipline of a subdiscipline, one foot on an appendage of an unbalanced centipede-like diagram of a line and staff organization in a business textbook. Rather than the universal topic which it is, it is relegated to a hinterland of biology, agriculture, zoology, or forestry.
Each university is unique, so there is no specific recommendation I see to be made from the above observation. It seems worthwhile to note for newly-forming units and for reorganization (a surprisingly common activity for administrators) that placement affects the criteria of faculty success. Salary, promotion, tenure, etc. are success measures based on topics addressed, research published, grants gained, students produced, professorships occupied, and emergence of distinguished alumni. Things that are taught and the research performed will be responsive to these peer criteria. The wildlife resource, or some definition of it will easily slip to irrelevancy in some scholarly communities; it will be re-cast to match the composition of experts in other schools.
If the faculty are successful (by most standards), students will leave schools with these locality-biased concepts. Not an argument against change or against examining definition and tradition, this is an appeal to examine the extraordinary local forces and to counter their inappropriate, and often self-serving, influences on the field now called wildlife management.
Within public agencies where most terrestrial-fauna- and fish-related workers are employed, there are units, at least budgetary, that tend to separate management or managerial-like-things from research, or to separate them from financial and administrative things, from land-related groups, and from law enforcement. I am fully aware that such units are needed as monetary pigeon-holes into which accountants may throw their sorted fiscal envelopes, and fully aware that some groups cannot change (in reasonable time) because of certain laws that allocate federal, state and provincial, and university funds. Nevertheless, "wildlife management" is now a part of agency existence, a budgetary and conceptual subunit, even designated as "management" in some agencies. It is not the totality, not expressive of the comprehensive, integrated, highly-interactive wild faunal and floral resource-related activities in which the total agency now engages or needs to in the near future.
The universities are strongly related to the agency(s) and to its paradigm. They purposely seek to relate well, to meet some goodness-of-fit criterion, to secure positions for graduates, grants, support in various ways, peer acceptance, and alumni support. The agency and university are locked in a conceptual force-field from which neither seems able to escape. Some do not yet realize they are imprisoned. The fate of the wildlife resource, the opportunity for its fullest expression, may also be locked therein.
An Alternative
Admittedly, at least on some days, nothing in the field called wildlife management seems to make any difference. Entire species are exterminated on the same day that hours of serious debate are spent on number of squirrels (Sciurus) that can be legally shot per day. Prime habitats are lost with the knock of a judge's gavel. Data bases are cleaned as if data were dust, not museum treasures. Perhaps nothing makes any difference because we do not have the standards and criteria for deciding on significance, in the statistical sense.
My perception is that the field now called wildlife management, in general, is involved in very important and necessary work. I perceive also flaws and weaknesses that, if continued, will have major long-term consequences to the effectiveness of wild faunal and floral resource management.
In 1969, I sought an American Indian word that meant "all of the lands and environments inhabited by wild animals" because "wildland" did not work well for the city park, rice paddy, or even pheasant-infested wheat field. Recently I sought an Egyptian word or phrase (based on the Society's selected symbols) for wildlife, but found al hayat alparryah (literally "life within the wilderness") did not include fish. Perhaps it is the proper phrase to be selected for long-term use to avoid the problems previously suggested between game and nongame. Perhaps there is another word.
Wild faunal systems management, while more inclusive than fisheries, integrated vertebrate pest damage management, and game management, is not sufficiently inclusive as a phrase for the activites of the modern field. The practitioner is sure to suboptimize by not including geomorphology and climatology, agronomy, toxicology, law enforcement, and plants. I argue for "rasking", a word coined to eliminate any connotation or prior meaning. It means designing, operating. and maintaining wild and semi-wild faunal and floral systems to produce a set of pre-stated benefits timely and cost-effectively for people. Easily criticized for its enormous scope, it nevertheless is a conceivable end toward which progress may be hastened and evaluated with computer aids (CAP653) (or not).
An alternative word, a concept symbol, may now be appropriate for the activity which has emerged and evolved over many centuries, not just in the past 55 years.
Not "the study of ...", not "the art of ...", not "the science of ..." rasking is a production activity. It is management. It is not a science1 or art; no additional words are needed. It is not an "...ology" but manipulative action. It is expected to reflect emphasis on production of net faunal and floral resource benefits. It is intended to connote modern concepts of a total resource system, fully as comprehensive as forestry or as fisheries.
| 1 That things must be scientific to good is a cultural phenomenon, post-Sputnik. Now, any discipline which insists upon being scientific becomes ethically and socially neutral, unable to express its values. |
People who practice rasking may be called raskers. To rask is to design and operate a faunal system. Rasking, like "marketing" or other topics, is a complex subject of immense social importance and is appropriately taught within universities. While it may be taught within a forestry school context (where many wildlife management programs are now taught) it is not biome or community-specific and must include cropland and wilderness, urban parks, grasslands, and wetlands. While it may be taught within biology programs (the other place where wildlife topics predominate), it must include the breadth of decision-making topics, long planning periods, computer skills, and practical sociological elements already discussed.
No one any longer masters the full range of the subject matter of forestry, even if the range is narrowly defined. The same is true of fisheries. It is unreasonable to expect such can be done for the wild floral and faunal system. Comprehensive mastery by an individual is not a criterion for defining a field, nor is it a criterion for a university curriculum. There will be great diversity within a field as broadly defined as rasking. This is desirable, for the definition is as expansive as the problem set, the domain of work (Table 2). The central themes will persist: (1) very inclusive systems grounded in general systems theory, (2) optimization, (3) design and operation, and (4) attention to costs (no matter how measured) of achieving stated human objectives. That's all.
The current evidence is that some wildlife managers are abusing the land and the resource. Abuse is a serious charge. For the rasker it means suboptimal use. That may sound like a mere play on words, but it is a phrase with scientific roots in operations research and systems analysis. Once a system is designed, objectives specified, constraints set, then computers can operate to solve for the answer. It produces the optimal solution. Once that solution is known, anything else done on the land for wildlife or to the animals themselves is suboptimal. If the correct, lowest net present value solution is A, and a person does B, the rasker's view is that B is abusive. Fix it; why be less than the best?
It is very easy to be suboptimal. The easiest way is never to ask about the goals or to search for the optimum. Without a view of the optimum, anything is probably satisfactory. It is much safer never to ask about what is optimal.
One realistic computer educational unit suggests that only after 5 to 8 "plays" or uses of the unit on ecosystems management do students come close to the correct answers. Each play is a decision like setting a deer season to achieve a population abundant enough for hunting but not so abundant as to destroy a large part of the reforestation effort in the county. One conclusion from this is that it may take 5 to 8 years before a person in the field really understands a system and can work with it to achieve a proper balance - - - the optimum. There may be more than 4 years of resource abuse by a professional wildlife manager before the optimum level is achieved!
A medical doctor studies and does an apprenticeship for over 9 years. He or she has only one animal to learn. The wildlifer has more than 20 to master (about 1000 if they are serious ecologists), plus habitats for each, plus economics and value systems, and policies, and forestry, and farming, and . . . . It is an almost impossible demand. In fact it is an impossible demand on even the most superior wildlifer! Suboptimal performance occurs almost by definition. The wildlifers are abusing the resource!
Training or education is partially at fault. Can anyone be expected to do all of the following:
The answer is obvious. What then is expected? The field has over-promised (as if it could do all of the above and more) and under-delivered. By under delivering but thwarting efforts at a more rational approach to the enormous problems, it has stabilized an abusive operation.
The raskers claim that there is a solution. It will probably be adopted as fast as a graveyard can be moved. It is straight forward.
Those people who work with wild animal populations, their areas, and the users of these populations present an anachronism. They are enamored of the biological rules of nomenclature, the importance of priority, type specimens, dichotomous keys, evolutionary and successional trends, and hierarchy of many types. Yet they have named themselves (or allowed themselves to be named) in a way inconsistent with their biological science background. They have allowed university and other organizational patterns to go unchallenged, and have allowed their limited theoretical bases, definition, and key phrases to be undercut by the erosive forces of imprecision.
"Only semantics" is an expression of the intellectually lazy and an escape from the hard work of clear definitions that form the theoretical grounds of most science and modern management. Precision in definition appears to me now to be more important than working on the goals of accuracy, precision, and nonbias (Overton 1971) of much wildlife-related research. Only recently has it become clear to me that the field, profession, or discipline (I do not know the correct word) called "wildlife management" is built on semantic sand. I present the following analysis to explain some past difficulties of agencies and academia, to describe a situation of interest which may have parallels in other disciplines, to point to the need to rebuild a theoretical base, and to suggest alternatives.
Linnaeus is said to have made a profound contribution to botany when he made the monocot-dicot conceptual cut. At least he did not say "monocots and nonmonocots." The binary branches of the conceptual world are made up of the "something" and "everything else" pairs. We have allowed the nonconcept of nongame to invade the field. We have become a lost ball in the tall weeds of definition and pseudo-definition. The recent spate of wildlife text books provides students a grassy wetland in which to roam in search for their professional identity. The examples:
Giles (herein) "...making decisions and taking actions to manipulate the structure, dynamics, and relations of wild faunal and floral populations, their spaces, and people to achieve specified human objectives by means of the wildlife resource."
Giles no longer struggles to have flora included. He argues from pragmatism. The history of the field and the entrenched ideas prevent the inclusion from ever happening.
Peek (1986:3): "...the art of making the land produce wildlife."
Shaw (1985) and Gilbert and Dodds (1987) dodged the definition bullet.
Anderson (1985:3): "...the art and science of manipulating populations and habitats for the animals and for human benefit."
Robinson and Bolen (1978:2): "...the application of ecological knowledge to populations of vertebrate animals and their plant and animal associates in a manner that strikes a balance between the needs of those populations and the needs of people."
Giles (1978:4): "...the science and art of making decisions and taking actions to manipulate the structure, dynamics, and relations of populations, habitats, and people to achieve specific human objectives by means of the wildlife resource."
Giles (1969:1): "...the science and art of changing the characteristics and interactions of habitats, wild animal populations, and men in order to achieve specific human goals by means of the wildlife resource."
Specific definitions were not given in Allen (1962) or Dasmann (1964).
Trefethen (1964): "...wildlife management attempts to control populations of wild animals for benefit of society."
Snow et al.(1947) [prepared in 1941, printed 1947]: "...the art of making land and water produce optimum sustained annual crops or the best species of wildlife for use consistent with utilization of land and water for other purposes."
Leopold (1933): "Game management is the art of making land produce sustained annual crops of wild game for recreational use."
There are some people engaged in the professional and quasi-professional pursuits associated with wildlife who persist in emphasizing the biological dimension of the field. ("Field" is the most general, vague, nonspecific term I can select, and I use it purposely.) Of course, an animal is biological, but is not the topic of the work of wildlife people the resource and the set of animal populations that have value or disproduct? Is not their topic at least as much economical as biological? What do they do mostly? Do they work with animals or with lands? My opinion is that among those who seek actively and directly to change populations, more than 90 percent of their studies and actions are with forests, farms, grasslands, and wetlands, more with the sciences of agronomy, forestry, hydrology, and geology than with zoology. Who, if any one, might the people of the field be fooling or seeking to fool about their subject matter? Perhaps no one. Perhaps there is only an error in emphasis or simply carelessness. The emphasis is not on the wrong thing; any emphasis is wrong. Arguing importance of topics is akin to a biologist arguing that the heart is the most important organ. No knowledgeable biologist will make such a claim. The system, the total system, needs to be the emphasis. If not emphasized, then wildlife people must face up to a sensitivity analysis as might be conducted in some linear programming (Dykstra 1984) class exercise. The analysis would indicate which are the most influential variables and to which ones the system performance measures respond if changes are made ... and those to which it is unresponsive. I hypothesize that in more than 90 percent of the problems solved, the dominant decision variables will be labor, costs, primary production per unit area, access, and protection, not testicle weight or a population estimate (plus or minus 500 animals).
The wildlife field, in the bud of youth, may become victim of its own lack of definition, its own scant dynamic, and the international juggernaut of shifts from a Cartesian world view (with its accents on parts and elements) to a configuration world view with emphases on wholes and patterns.
In classes in elementary economics, it is learned that resource benefits are rarely linear and that there is agroup of concepts that usually show benefits per unit costs declining as a population increases past a point. ln particular species, the more animals, the more likely a pest status is to be reached. Counterintuitively, it is highly likely that more genuine resource benefits occur to society when a species is in a threatened condition (zone A in Fig. 21.1) than during much of the remainder of its expansion or decline.
A point from all of the above is that wildlife is a resource and that to manipulate it actively (i.e., to reduce, increase, or stabilize a performance measure associated with it (e.g., hours spent hunting)) there are many things that can be (and are) done and are done simultaneously to achieve from it many benefits. Fig. 21.1 indicates clearly that "more" is not "better" and resource managers' objectives are unlikely to be in all, or even in most cases, to maximize animal populations.
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Fig. 21.1. An hypothesis about the relationship of potential human benefits from a wild animal population in its perceived total abundance. Benefits may be relatively high even when populations are low or endangered (B). In a region (C), they are of only passing interest, but values increase (as at E) suggested in comments about vast herds or flocks. At F and G, excessive populations may cause damage. Note the same level of benefits (a) might be achieved at 4 very different population levels. The wildlife benefit-to-abundance curve is hardly linear. To see or experience the environment of a rare species can be thrilling, provide hours of secondary reflection and social disclosure, and hours of recreational activity in searching. Benefits per unit invested rarely occur at the maximum population, and at some level "enough is enough" and displeasure or damage occurs to a high proportion of people, perhaps to all, resulting in zero or negative net benefits. |
Of course I do not think this is the case, but I do think steps are needed to build a sound theoretical and conceptual underpinning to the work that wildlife resource managers do. That base is needed now, before any further encroachment of claims of "prior usage", and before another class of graduates invades the field with suboptimal concepts now frayed from over 50 years of misuse.
I do not think a theory can be created that encompasses all that currently exists or has wandered in under the conceptual umbrella called wildlife management. Society membership drive leaders to the contrary, I think there is a need to define this thing we do, and then to be more precise in doing it. It is perfectly all right for people to belong to a group; pay dues; support an organizational policy, building, and staff; make claims; "stand" for things; and enjoy whatever benefits may accrue. With or without an organization to bolster it, a body of knowledge only exists (and is nameable) when there is an essential core theory, a sine qua non, a fundamental ground.
I hold that this theory begins with a definition because we are not a fundamental measurable entity like a creature X that we have all learned to call a "deer." We are a nominal abstraction, like "heat."
We have difficulty with definition from the beginning of thought about the topic, for we cannot define wildlife. Some people include plants, other exclude them. The remainder do not know what to do with reptiles, amphibians, mollusks, crayfish, or insects. Fish constitute a continuing problem; are they wildlife?
We allowed our field to be bastardized by a fisheries commissioner when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was created. He inserted the word in last-minute legislative transaction. This action at the federal level has since logically implied that the two, fish and wildlife, are separate. Fish, legally, are not a sub-set of wildlife. Legal or not, when it comes to budgeting, exactly where the often-but-poorly-used term is proper, money for actions for fish are allocated separately from those largely for terrestrial animals.
It seems now that such a linguistic, biopolitical, educational, and recent "conservation biology" organizational mess exists that there is need for the wildlife interests to draw themselves to full statue and then, realizing a perfect or totally satisfactory solution is not now possible, and probably never will be, and given history, then to decide on who they are or want to be, and then build on that decision. Failing to do so, they will continue largely as a political entity, uncommitted, and be blown hither and yon by fad, law, pressure groups, and political whim. It is not a bad condition for organizations (note the success of politically serviceable, nebulous, nonphrases like "multiple-use", "sustained yield", and "ecosystem management"), and I can understand why those in groups would find the present vague condition satisfactory. However, it is not a condition on which to build the viable science or managerial system so badly needed by people and their faunal resource.
An analysis of similarity and parallelism between wildlife work and work in other fields can be instructive. There are parallels within fisheries and forestry circles which are familiar and especially relevant.
The Nominal Resource
In one field, forestry, there are trees. In another, animals. (I personally include all wild animal, plant, and other biotic populations as wild life but hypothesize that I am in the minority.)
There are types of trees and types of animals. Conifers and hardwoods are well known tree groups. Similarly wildlife is typed, e.g., waterfowl. There are overlapping types of trees; a type is for the convenience of a user and has little or no basis in biology. For example, there are hardwoods and softwoods, some hardwoods having softer wood (e.g., Tilia) than most softwoods. Those who work with trees have some of the same nominal problems as those who work with animals. The overlapping types of animals include game, furbearers, pest, urban wildlifeland endangered species. The raccoon, Procyon lotor, is an example of an animal that, depending on time and place, can be included in any of the five types. The naming of type is related to use, and is thus a resource concept, not necessarily one of biological characteristics.
Those doing forest work study trees under the topic of dendrology. Animal workers have much greater diversity than those who work with trees. Not only are there more species (e.g., within birds) than trees, but workers must study animals under ornithology, mammalogy, herpetology, malacology, and entomology. There remains debate over whether ichthyology is a primary topic (like mammalogy) of the work of people in the wildlife field, or whether it is only secondarily essential, like soils. (I prefer to include it, for I see no rational way to exclude it since I may manage for fish, either as game species to be harvested by anglers, or minnows to be observed to increase a life list, or forage species to be harvested by a predator, as a disease host to be harvested by anglers, or minnows to be observed to increase a life list, or forage species to be harvested by a predator, ar as a disease host to be reduced,or as a host of the young stage of fresh water mussels to be stabilized.) Wildlife is all plant and animal life, terrestrial and aquatic, found in generally unconstrained or undomesticated conditions.
The Meanings of Management
In forest work, there is the subject matter of silvics. Wildlife workers, to my knowledge, have no parallel subject. There may be similar diverse autecological or single-species studies, a variety of species monographs, surprisingly rarely sponsored by The Wildlife Society per se. The subject matter of silvics overlaps strongly that of silviculture, a subject the definition of which is not at all clear or on which there is little agreement. I take in this chapter a very narrow concept of it (for to some people, forestry = silviculture) and see it as the study of the design of forest age and structure. It is equivalent in wildlife circles to studies of population manipulation, an area of work that designs population structure in terms of species richness, sex ratios, age ratios, and abundance, and population dynamics in terms of mortality, survival, natality, and migration. I called it fauniculture (Minckler and Giles 1981).
The most difficult parallelism to reconcile is "forest management." This is only a small (but important) part of the total, enormously large, and complex activity called forestry. Wildlife workers have a Journal of Wildlife Management which, among parallels and by analogy, would be expected to address that part of the wildlife field called "management." It is clear that there is no term for wildlife workers that is equivalent to or parallel with forestry. What is the word that symbolizes the entire realm of science and management, physical entities and their users, processes, consumption, and appreciation of the tree-related resources? It is forestry! What is the parallel linguistic code, the word for the entire realm of study and description, analysis and prescription of how benefits will be produced for people from wild animals and plants? See Table 21.1. We struggle with a diminutive title. Our entire field of activity has a name the equivalent of one mere course title in an entire curriculum of activities and topics called, collectively, forestry.
Forest management deals with management science, the decision processes that are associated with the tree-based land system. Forestry includes much more than managing tree stands. It includes, for example, marketing, industrial and international topics, production, fire protection, etc., etc. There is no equivalent concept among wildlife workers. What is the equivalency? What is X in the following relationship:
Forestry / X = Forest Management / Faunal System Management
Wildlife management is not parallel with or similar to forest management. Wildlife management is more inclusive of subject matter and topics than forestry but uses a name equivalent to only one subject or specialty within it.
There are situations in which schools are named "forestry and wildlife." A grammar instructor would insist upon parallelism and suggest "trees and wildlife" or better: "forests and wildlife", and may suggest " forestry and X", X being the equivalent comprehensive system, like forestry, that treats of comprehensive animal-related resource systems. There is no word-equivalent for X. A wildlife worker would find unconscionable the phrasing of some group dealing with "big game and ducks." He or she would argue that there is bad hierarchy and nonparallelism and would insist on "big game and waterfowl." Wildlife workers have
Table 21.1. Parallels and nonparallels among terms within forestry, fisheries, and wildlife management areas.
| Level | Forestry | Fisheries | Wildlife Management |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Species of tree | Species of fish | species of bird, etc. |
| 2 | the oaks | the salmonids | the cervids |
| 3 | tree | fish | mammal bird? snake?etc.? |
| 4 | stand | school | herd, pack, flock |
| 5 | commercial hardwoods | game fish | game mammals |
| 6 | conifers | cold water fish | raptors |
| 7 | red oaks | cyprinids | hawks |
| 8 | forest stand | stock: game fish of a lake | furbearers of an area |
| 9 | conifer management | forest fish management | game management |
| 10 | logger management | angler management | hunter management |
| 11 | a forest | a lake | a refuge |
| 121 | a forest | a forest | a forest |
| 13 | hardwoods of a region | the coldwater fishery | songbirds of a region |
| 14 | a forester | a fisheries manager | a wildlifer |
| 15 | dendrology | icthyology | mammalogy (etc.) |
| 16 | Department or School of Forestry | Department or School of Fisheries | Department or School of X? |
| 17 | Forestry | Fisheries | X? |
allowed a forestry and wildlife nesting. The smaller nestling is tolerated; held and conditioned as subdominant in schools and agencies around the world.
Strangely, fisheries has not been so treated. There are no departments of trees and fish. There is fisheries, conceptually equivalent to forestry. The fishery is fully as complex and parallel, at least for some students, to the forest. There is the management subsystem of that field. Within fisheries groups there is equivalent misguided and excessive emphasis on biology as in the wildlife field, but there are strong parallels between topics in fisheries and forestry (ignoring the overlap of the forest fishery). There are trees and fish, the forest and the fishery, forestry and fisheries. The difference in meaning between the plural of fishery and the complex fish resource system seems to bother no one; it is usually clear from the context. The context rarely clarifies the intended meaning of the use of "wildlife management." Fish-, fishery-, and fisheries-management are course titles used in major universities suggesting, if not clarity of thought or nomenclatural sub set, a part of the larger array of purity, at least that "management" is courses within the fisheries system. If forestry treats of the tree-resource related system, and fisheries, the complex topic of all activities involving the fish-related resources of a region, then what is the word or phrase for the terrestrial-faunal-related system? See Table 2.
Table 2. The subject matter of rasking.
Organizations
In some universities and agencies, wildlife science is separated from other wildlife-related topics. This implies, regrettably, that management is not or cannot be science and that other topics not clearly "science" are inappropriate for teaching, research, or for being communicated to potential users. Where law enforcement, for example, can be studied, then it is science, but the connotations are unmistakable about law enforcement development, budgetary systems and allocation strategies, demonstrations, objective setting, political influences, and information systems.
The demarcation of "wildlife science" suggests there is something else more than science going on and that merely adding "and other topics" are not satisfactory or sufficient. The assumption is usually that the other is"wildlife management", a most awkward condition, because that is said by some to be the name for the entire field of activity, of which wildlife science is a part.
It is perfectly appropriate for groups to decide upon what aspects of a field they will concentrate. "Wildlife science" is a broad enough category to avoid most territorial skirmishes, but when it is placed in a title with connotations of parallelism such as "fisheries and wildlife science", it is wrong for many reasons -- from grammar to grant-gaining.
A discussion of the placement of wildlife-related instruction and research within the modern university is beyond the scope of this chapter. Such placement, like naming, does however, affect the mental model of the field. Rather than a topic placed on some lateral line showing all topics engaged in the university, the topic usually becomes displayed as subdiscipline of a subdiscipline, one foot on an appendage of an unbalanced centipede-like diagram of a line and staff organization in a business textbook. Rather than the universal topic which it is, it is relegated to a hinterland of biology, agriculture, zoology, or forestry.
Each university is unique, so there is no specific recommendation I see to be made from the above observation. It seems worthwhile to note for newly-forming units and for reorganization (a surprisingly common activity for administrators) that placement affects the criteria of faculty success. Salary, promotion, tenure, etc. are success measures based on topics addressed, research published, grants gained, students produced, professorships occupied, and emergence of distinguished alumni. Things that are taught and the research performed will be responsive to these peer criteria. The wildlife resource, or some definition of it will easily slip to irrelevancy in some scholarly communities; it will be re-cast to match the composition of experts in other schools.
If the faculty are successful (by most standards), students will leave schools with these locality-biased concepts. Not an argument against change or against examining definition and tradition, this is an appeal to examine the extraordinary local forces and to counter their inappropriate, and often self-serving, influences on the field now called wildlife management.
Within public agencies where most terrestrial-fauna- and fish-related workers are employed, there are units, at least budgetary, that tend to separate management or managerial-like-things from research, or to separate them from financial and administrative things, from land-related groups, and from law enforcement. I am fully aware that such units are needed as monetary pigeon-holes into which accountants may throw their sorted fiscal envelopes, and fully aware that some groups cannot change (in reasonable time) because of certain laws that allocate federal, state and provincial, and university funds. Nevertheless, "wildlife management" is now a part of agency existence, a budgetary and conceptual subunit, even designated as "management" in some agencies. It is not the totality, not expressive of the comprehensive, integrated, highly-interactive wild faunal and floral resource-related activities in which the total agency now engages or needs to in the near future.
The universities are strongly related to the agency(s) and to its paradigm. They purposely seek to relate well, to meet some goodness-of-fit criterion, to secure positions for graduates, grants, support in various ways, peer acceptance, and alumni support. The agency and university are locked in a conceptual force-field from which neither seems able to escape. Some do not yet realize they are imprisoned. The fate of the wildlife resource, the opportunity for its fullest expression, may also be locked therein.
An Alternative
Admittedly, at least on some days, nothing in the field called wildlife management seems to make any difference. Entire species are exterminated on the same day that hours of serious debate are spent on number of squirrels (Sciurus) that can be legally shot per day. Prime habitats are lost with the knock of a judge's gavel. Data bases are cleaned as if data were dust, not museum treasures. Perhaps nothing makes any difference because we do not have the standards and criteria for deciding on significance, in the statistical sense.
My perception is that the field now called wildlife management, in general, is involved in very important and necessary work. I perceive also flaws and weaknesses that, if continued, will have major long-term consequences to the effectiveness of wild faunal and floral resource management.
In 1969, I sought an American Indian word that meant "all of the lands and environments inhabited by wild animals" because "wildland" did not work well for the city park, rice paddy, or even pheasant-infested wheat field. Recently I sought an Egyptian word or phrase (based on the Society's selected symbols) for wildlife, but found al hayat alparryah (literally "life within the wilderness") did not include fish. Perhaps it is the proper phrase to be selected for long-term use to avoid the problems previously suggested between game and nongame. Perhaps there is another word.
Wild faunal systems management, while more inclusive than fisheries, integrated vertebrate pest damage management, and game management, is not sufficiently inclusive as a phrase for the activites of the modern field. The practitioner is sure to suboptimize by not including geomorphology and climatology, agronomy, toxicology, law enforcement, and plants. I argue for "rasking", a word coined to eliminate any connotation or prior meaning. It means designing, operating. and maintaining wild and semi-wild faunal and floral systems to produce a set of pre-stated benefits timely and cost-effectively for people. Easily criticized for its enormous scope, it nevertheless is a conceivable end toward which progress may be hastened and evaluated with computer aids (CAP653) (or not).
An alternative word, a concept symbol, may now be appropriate for the activity which has emerged and evolved over many centuries, not just in the past 55 years.
Not "the study of ...", not "the art of ...", not "the science of ..." rasking is a production activity. It is management. It is not a science1 or art; no additional words are needed. It is not an "...ology" but manipulative action. It is expected to reflect emphasis on production of net faunal and floral resource benefits. It is intended to connote modern concepts of a total resource system, fully as comprehensive as forestry or as fisheries.
| 1 That things must be scientific to good is a cultural phenomenon, post-Sputnik. Now, any discipline which insists upon being scientific becomes ethically and socially neutral, unable to express its values. |
People who practice rasking may be called raskers. To rask is to design and operate a faunal system. Rasking, like "marketing" or other topics, is a complex subject of immense social importance and is appropriately taught within universities. While it may be taught within a forestry school context (where many wildlife management programs are now taught) it is not biome or community-specific and must include cropland and wilderness, urban parks, grasslands, and wetlands. While it may be taught within biology programs (the other place where wildlife topics predominate), it must include the breadth of decision-making topics, long planning periods, computer skills, and practical sociological elements already discussed.
No one any longer masters the full range of the subject matter of forestry, even if the range is narrowly defined. The same is true of fisheries. It is unreasonable to expect such can be done for the wild floral and faunal system. Comprehensive mastery by an individual is not a criterion for defining a field, nor is it a criterion for a university curriculum. There will be great diversity within a field as broadly defined as rasking. This is desirable, for the definition is as expansive as the problem set, the domain of work (Table 2). The central themes will persist: (1) very inclusive systems grounded in general systems theory, (2) optimization, (3) design and operation, and (4) attention to costs (no matter how measured) of achieving stated human objectives. That's all.
The current evidence is that some wildlife managers are abusing the land and the resource. Abuse is a serious charge. For the rasker it means suboptimal use. That may sound like a mere play on words, but it is a phrase with scientific roots in operations research and systems analysis. Once a system is designed, objectives specified, constraints set, then computers can operate to solve for the answer. It produces the optimal solution. Once that solution is known, anything else done on the land for wildlife or to the animals themselves is suboptimal. If the correct, lowest net present value solution is A, and a person does B, the rasker's view is that B is abusive. Fix it; why be less than the best?
It is very easy to be suboptimal. The easiest way is never to ask about the goals or to search for the optimum. Without a view of the optimum, anything is probably satisfactory. It is much safer never to ask about what is optimal.
One realistic computer educational unit suggests that only after 5 to 8 "plays" or uses of the unit on ecosystems management do students come close to the correct answers. Each play is a decision like setting a deer season to achieve a population abundant enough for hunting but not so abundant as to destroy a large part of the reforestation effort in the county. One conclusion from this is that it may take 5 to 8 years before a person in the field really understands a system and can work with it to achieve a proper balance - - - the optimum. There may be more than 4 years of resource abuse by a professional wildlife manager before the optimum level is achieved!
A medical doctor studies and does an apprenticeship for over 9 years. He or she has only one animal to learn. The wildlifer has more than 20 to master (about 1000 if they are serious ecologists), plus habitats for each, plus economics and value systems, and policies, and forestry, and farming, and . . . . It is an almost impossible demand. In fact it is an impossible demand on even the most superior wildlifer! Suboptimal performance occurs almost by definition. The wildlifers are abusing the resource!
Training or education is partially at fault. Can anyone be expected to do all of the following:
The answer is obvious. What then is expected? The field has over-promised (as if it could do all of the above and more) and under-delivered. By under delivering but thwarting efforts at a more rational approach to the enormous problems, it has stabilized an abusive operation.
The raskers claim that there is a solution. It will probably be adopted as fast as a graveyard can be moved. It is straight forward.
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Last revision January 17, 2000.