Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Surgical Sterilization: An Underutilized Procedure For Evaluating The Merits Of Induced Sterility, James J. Kennelly, Kathryn A. Converse

Contraception in Wildlife Management

Despite more than 4 decades of effort, development of effective wildlife damage control programs based on sterilization of target species has met with limited success. This is partly due to the fact that investigators have assumed, rather than empirically tested, whether the reproductive strategies of the target populations were vulnerable to the planned treatment. Equally important, methods selected to induce sterility usually involve a chemical agent that can affect sociosexual behaviors of the nuisance population. In this report, we illustrate how surgically induced sterility circumvents both problems-how it enables one to assess the feasibility and applicability of the concept without …