Modern Wild Faunal Resource System Management
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Working toward a precise definition...
There are many kinds of wildlife management. This is an e-book of web unit about one of them. I think it is a good alternative. There are others equally as good, even better for some intentions. There is no contest among the alternatives, no Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach
| "...a darkening plain, Where ignorant armies clash by night" |
There are some charlatans about. There are places where there are no wildlife managers or their influence. There are widely different views and practices (and anti-practice) of wildlife management. Maybe the alternative teased apart and described here may not be too poor.
In recent years, when any word will do and "whatever" or "blah,blah,blah" replace words and sentences, then emphasizing clear definitions seems irrelevant. Emphasis is relevant and it is essential that people of goodwill eventually agree on a written statement of who they are and what they practice. The statement must be inclusive and suggest the exclusive.
| Wildlife management means making decisions and taking actions to manipulate the structure, dynamics, and relations of wild faunal populations, faunal space, and humans to achieve specified objectives by means of the animal resource. |
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No, it is not "the science of..." a phrase and social phenomenon left over from the Sputnik era. It is just something that people do. It may include science but there are many decisions and actions that can hardly include or even aspire to include science. It's just doing something.
The most important thing done is making decisions. What is the proper season? What plants should be planted and fertilized? What is the best educational sequence? Is this practice better than that? What is the best strategy for the agency faced with global warming? These are the type decisions and they require, at a minimum, all of the successful educational background of at least the equivalent to the superior Master of Science university program in wildlife management. There is more to management than making decisions (but the decisions are the things for which society and business people expect to be paying high prices, not the prices for common field work). No appeal to make managers indoor or ivory-tower types, the decisions need to be coupled with action in the committee, lab, and field. Part of the field work can be justified as fun, but managers are not paid to have fun. They are paid to make decisions and become involved in those decisions so that there can be corrective work, adjustment, and clarifications. Besides, it is just practical for a manager to drive a truck or plow a clearing when essential, even though that is not part of his or her job description. Managers need to be able to tag ducks, but their best return for their salary will be in deciding on the species, the sample size, the tag size, the disposition of the data, the data analyses, and the recommendations based on information from the tag recoveries. Tagging is the action; often non-wildlife managers can do this. The manager can, and will, and must do so occasionally, but the calling is that which is in the above definition.
If the manager does not cause things to change, he or she has not "managed." (If something was changing and the manager stopped it, this is still manipulating the system.) For years I used the analogy of the steersman, the root of "cybernetics" to highlight the concept. The manager is (or should try to be) in control. He or she guides the ship. There may be storms or accidents but there is the steers-person, the person in charge, in control, causing desired change. The three universal classes of things to change are structure, dynamics, and relations. These three can be seen as sub-units, organizational units for each of the big three of the definition: wild animal populations, faunal space, and people.
Populations in the definition seems straight forward but it isn't. First, it excludes plants. I hate to do this since much of the work of the wildlifer is with plants. I once thought that wild plants would be included in wild-life but competing groups have formed, university courses are set, and wild-animal-oriented people already have an excessively large domain of interest and responsibility. I wish for but no longer expect for plants to be brought under the umbrella. Another good reason is that trees are also wild plants and those working with trees already have a claim with deep-driven and well-marked stakes. In 1999 there were over 409 thousands "hits" in a search of the Web for the word wildlife. It is very diversely applied. The other reason that "faunal populations" has more meaning is that the types of animals that are to be managed are unclear. Considerable discussion continues but most agencies and university departments separate "fisheries and wildlife." Game agencies hold the line, but " non-game", a non-word, has crept into the picture and under the umbrella so no one knows whether to include songbirds, city rats, feral cats, rabid foxes, marine mammals, or butterflies and moths (but probably not the gypsy moth). Developing a definition may be a word game to some, a nod to history to some, an academic waste of time to others, but it has profound legal ramifications, influences agency staff and budgets, limits responsibilities, and assigns responsibilities to (or allows tolerance of) some people unprepared to handle them well.
Habitat management has been the byword in wildlife management for years. It is too limited as will be discussed. Faunal space is visible habitat but also time; all of the abiotic factors like slope, elevation, lunar forces, and latitude; nearby things ("landscape ecology"); and animals themselves (as together in dens or animals surrounding an animal in the center of a herd).
People can be manipulated as parents, teachers, preachers, and leaders well know. (You may say "influenced" but I mean something more real, observable, or measurable. I'm trying to discuss significant observable change.) The manager can get people to vote in various ways, support programs, stop violating laws, and otherwise perform in desired ways. People state objectives and assign weights to these objectives and act to prevent certain actions from taking place. Putting them in jail certainly changes their behavior! Using thorn-bush hedges can keep them off lawns. All of these may be part of the work of the wildlife resource manager.
Why? To achieve objectives. Not just any objectives will do. These need to be pre-stated and written and actions and decisions directed toward achieving them. The citizens presumably can state objectives that they wish the public agency to achieve. The landowner may do the same for the manager paid to manage the resources of his or her lands. Objectives are many and complex and one of the primary tasks of the manager is in assisting the client, citizens or others, to articulate and quantify those objectives. Without them, there are no criteria for judging successful management.
The definition is long and has many dimensions. For the future, it seems to me that it is necessary to clarify who are the wildlife managers. Without a definition, no curricula can be designed, every agency is at risk of being split or consumed, every fund can be misdirected, every coalition can be scrambled. The population of workers is large; if anyone can be called a wildlife manager, then everyone is one. When society or enterprises seek experts with background, recognized education, and meaningful experience to achieve their faunal resource objectives there ought to be some criteria, perhaps some assistance in discovering who those people are. Human benefits cannot be sustained from the faunal resource by amateurs and ad hoc actions.
Who are the managers?
They make decisions.
They concentrate on structure, dynamics and relations
They work with faunal populations, faunal space, and people
They achieve human objectives from the animal resource.
Those are the wildlife managers
The definition excludes some people who now call themselves wildlife managers but very few. It excludes many activities now called by some people wildlife management. It usually excludes people who are "in wildlife" or who "do wildlife." Exclusions mean only that those seeming to be excluded are working within an alternative wildlife management. They need to argue for the preference or rightness of their definition and may need to form alternative associations or unify as functional groups within the total rural resource management arena.
Suggestion:Be sure that you can repeat the definition, word for word, for later use.
This is not a web unit about alternative wildlife managements for that would require intensive comparisons. I see no reason to elaborate on aspects of alternatives that have little or no merit. It is a statement of an alternative, the best that I can formulate after 50 years of working in the field and virtually committing my life-thought to it. Biased, a polemic, or other invective, at least this unit within the Lasting Forest web site and within this Faunal System Unit presents one position as clearly as possible so that other alternatives may be compared to it.
The elements of the alternative will be brought out within each unit of this site but some of the keys elements are...
Hopefully you will see the trails of each of these elements throughout the Faunal System units.
Do you know any well-established and accepted wildlife management practice or theory that will not fit or be acceptable under the definition above? Are there other tests for the definition? |
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Last revision January 19, 2004.