Many people have no problem spending public money to “incentivize” their business or occupation. However, placating the demands of a special interest group can have ludicrous results. In “Big Game in Alaska: A History of Wildlife and People” Morgan Sherwood cited a cost-benefit analysis by C. Hart Merriam, who found that Pennsylvania “had spent $90,000 over a period (in the late 1800s) to destroy hawks and owls that killed rodents and other pests and were therefore worth $3.9 million to farmers, all in order to save $1,875 worth of poultry.”
Most professional wildlife managers believe bounties are ineffective. Wolves were eliminated throughout much of the American West, but dedicated government trappers and widespread use of poison accounted for most of the carnage. Coyotes have expanded their range and are more numerous than ever despite more than a century of bounties and other forms of lethal control.
Most bounty schemes fail because they neglected to consider more than one side of the issue or account for human nature. Bounties become a source of income, and fraud is often an issue. For example, when the Territory paid bounties on hair seals, agents required seal flippers for evidence – and they cared little if the flippers were from a target species. The Territory paid $1.2 million in bounties for 358,023 “hair seals” from 1927-1958.
Similarly, the bounty on Dolly Varden was quickly discontinued after the Territory doled out $96,344. Fisheries biologists examined 500 fish tails turned in for the bounty and found only 10 percent were Dolly Varden tails. Most were salmon tails. Bounties can also create an economic disincentive to eradicate or reduce a target species. A prudent bounty collector will leave the breeding population intact so more animals are produced next year.
Nevertheless, bounties seem to be effective on marine mammals. After all, they breathe air, and there aren’t many places to hide on the surface of the ocean. In the November 1915 edition of the Zoological Society Bulletin, C. H. Townsend reported that during the previous two years British Columbia paid bounties of $14,329 on Steller sea lions and hair seals. The province’s bounty fund was exhausted after 2,875 sea lions and 2,987 seals were claimed. Townsend and others believed the harbor seal population along the North Atlantic coast was destroyed through bounties instigated by fishermen.
But who’s to say a sea otter supposedly shot in Southeast Alaska wasn’t taken from Prince William Sound, Kachemak Bay, or elsewhere in Alaska? Fish and Game will be paying bounties on sea otters shot from Ketchikan to Attu Island, including individual animals taken from Southwest Alaska, where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated some populations as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. When the funding for bounties is depleted, the program will have had less effect in Southeast Alaska than anticipated.
Townsend, a former chief of the fisheries division of the U.S. Fish Commission, was not amused by the use of bounties. He wrote, “This is the usual procedure with fishermen who may be depended upon to attribute the depletion of fisheries to other causes than the wasteful fishing methods practiced by themselves.”
by Rick Sinnott, Alaska Dispatch | Read more:
Aaron Jansen illustration
