However, now because of the booming tourist industry, the demand for frog legs ( considered exotic nad sold under the name – jumping chicken) is commonly available in several restaurants in the state. Though illegal, the rampant harvest still continues and has now become indiscriminate – capturing breeding individuals, gravid females and undersized individuals to meet the demand of the restaurants. Sadly there’s no data going back in time, however attempting to obtain logs in the form of receipt books from restauranteurs (where scarcely possible) may help trace such temporal patterns.

Enjoy reading your blog,
Regards,
Aaron

Scientist wants to fight financial crisis with frogs

Wildlife is simply an unscalable food source. Consider fishing, which is basically a hunting activity. It only supplies 1% of global calories, mainly to the wealthy, many of whom have been sold on the heart health benefits of omega-3s (which are not supported by the only
extensive meta-analyses of the data).

A reasonable proportion of hunters/fishers don’t have much respect for laws (or welfare), hence compliance is a huge issue.

Back when I attended duck shoots at Bool Lagoon in the 90s, every time Freckled ducks showed up during shooting, they were shot. We picked them up regularly and could generally tell when a shooter had shot one … any time a shooter made no effort to retrieve a duck which was clearly downed, there was a good chance that it wasn’t a legal kill, perhaps a Freckled, perhaps a coot (the old hunters call them “eye openers” — think about it), perhaps he already had a bag (unusual, but occasionally this happened).

A nice study in the late 80s in Canada (Nieman et al, Monitoring hunter performance in prairie Canada’, Transactions of the 52nd North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference 52,233–245.) observed shooters from hidden hides, then interviewed them. The result: hunter estimates of cripple rates were low, and about 12% of hunters broke licence conditions.

Read some of the articles on the following site about illegal fishing:

http://www.aic.gov.au/topics/environment/fishing.html

Illegal fishers are resourceful and cunning and they will satisfy a demand where it exists and the money makes the risks worth taking.

Why does the kangaroo industry need such a fancy system of tags to prevent (or attempt to prevent) illegal activities?