Environmental Issue of Wildlife Sustainability

Environmental Issue of Wildlife Sustainability

Introduction

This paper aims to discuss the environmental issue of Wildlife Sustainability. The main threat to the wild life sustainability is the hunting of wildlife animals. These days hunting, fishing, nature tourism and the collection of animals are all forms of direct use of wild animals. In fact, the harvest of wildlife for human consumption and use is a major threat to global biodiversity and paradoxically, to the many people who depend on it (Taylor, 2010). Millions of people around the world rely on wildlife as a major source of protein, calories, micronutrients, and in many cases, livelihoods. Although humans have been hunting wildlife for millennia, increasing human populations, improved hunting technologies, expanded market access, and logging roads that bring people deeper into tropical forests all contribute to increased pressure on wildlife populations (Cooper & Cooper, 2013).

Discussion

No doubt, overexploitation is now one of the major threats to mammals, reptiles, and birds, second only to habitat destruction (Manfredo, 2008). The hunting of wildlife is considered the single most geographically widespread form of resource extraction due to which wildlife management is largely unsustainable. A research reveals that the scale and magnitude of wildlife hunting for human consumption can be seen as a biggest hurdle for wildlife sustainability (Robinson & Bennett, 1999). This situation has come to be known as the “bush meat crisis”, which is a colloquial African term meaning “meat from the bush”, and “crisis”, the unsustainable levels at which wildlife is being harvested.

Similar to fisheries, wildlife can be viewed as a renewable resource whose regenerative capacity allows some level of harvest while sustaining stock populations at ecologically viable levels (Manfredo, 2008). A given level of harvest is considered sustainable if it is at or below the level that permits the resource to regenerate ...