Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

What Enables Size-Selective Trophy Hunting Of Wildlife?, Chris T. Darimont, K. Rosie Child

Big-Game and Trophy Hunting Collection

Although rarely considered predators, wildlife hunters can function as important ecological and evolutionary agents. In part, their influence relates to targeting of large reproductive adults within prey populations. Despite known impacts of sizeselective harvests, however, we know little about what enables hunters to kill these older, rarer, and presumably more wary individuals. In other mammalian predators, predatory performance varies with knowledge and physical condition, which accumulates and declines, respectively, with age. Moreover, some species evolved camouflage as a physical trait to aid in predatory performance. In this work, we tested whether knowledge-based faculty (use of a hunting guide with accumulated …