Ten Thousand Tonnes of Small Animals: Wildlife Consumption in Papua New Guinea, a Vital Resource in Need of Management

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Wildlife Conservation Society

Across the globe, many nations have gone through a period of unmanaged wildlife consumption characterized by massive population crashes and extinction of vertebrate species. The dramatic declines of useful animal resources because of this over-consumption have often been followed by a determined effort to regulate and manage wildlife consumption, often too late to avoid extinction and even more often too late to enable the resource population to recover to harvestable levels. Even with the lessons learned in the past, there is still little proactive effort in many countries in which people still rely on hunted animals as a major protein source to create management plans before species populations collapse or become extinct. Despite the hard lessons learned worldwide, it seems governments lack the will to manage wildlife resources and people lack the motivation to regulate their behaviour so long as free wildlife is readily available.