Andreas Wilting There are often bush fences between the traps, into which the animals are herded, he said, a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany.
“They set up traps, little fences, more traps, little fences,” Wilting said, “and they set them up along the entire ridgeline for 100 metres, so any animal that crosses or walks along that ridgeline is sure to get caught in the trap. That’s why people often call these traps overland drift nets.”
Wilting and his colleagues, including staff from the environmental group WWF Vietnam, studied the impact of 11 years of aggressive trap removal in two protected areas in central Vietnam, the Hue Saola Nature Reserve and the Quang Nam Saola Nature Reserve, which together cover about 32,000 hectares (79,000 acres) of closed-canopy rainforest and reach up to about 1,500 meters above sea level.
These are especially important for the conservation of the many endangered and endemic species that live in the Anamite Mountains, including a large cattle breed called the saola (NigetinhensisThe species was first described in 1993 and has not been seen in the wild since 2013.
Hunting is illegal in both reserves but is still common, scientists say.
Andrew TilkerThe team member from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research said most trapping in Southeast Asia is not for subsistence, but for restaurants and wildlife markets.
“In my experience, many people think of trapping as something that economically disadvantaged people do in search of food,” he says, “and that’s simply not the case in Vietnam. And this is important because, at least in Vietnam, there’s no moral conflict between removing the traps and depriving people of nutrition.”
Luong Viet HungWWF Vietnam. He said that between 20 and 30 percent of the people employed to remove the traps were former poachers.
The researchers estimated that over an 11-year period, the number of cells in which traps were found fell by 36.9 percent.
The average area forest rangers had to cover to find traps increased from 1.3 hectares in 2011 to 2.6 hectares in 2021.
The program costs about $220,000 a year, funded by WWF Vietnam and the Vietnamese government, with the average cost of removing one trap being $20.50, compared with about $1.13 to set one.
Although the program was successful, the researchers say this approach alone cannot address the threat posed by wildlife trapping — in fact, it may have only pushed poachers deeper into the forest or into other protected areas.
The researchers estimate that rolling out such a trap-removal campaign across Southeast Asia would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and may be impractical.
Christopher O’Brian At Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
He said removing the traps was one way to address the problem, but it should be used in conjunction with a longer-term strategy that addressed the socio-economic reasons for setting the traps.
“It’s important to note that trapping is not a problem unique to Southeast Asia — it’s likely to occur anywhere next to protected areas where people are struggling with food and money,” O’Brien said.
“And many species that are trapped suffer collateral damage. For example, lions in Africa are declining at unprecedented rates as a result of being caught in snares set up to capture large herbivores.”
Jan Kamler Professor Kamler of Oxford University is pessimistic about the problem and says removing the traps will not solve it. He says indiscriminate trapping has already wiped out tigers and leopards from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.
“Probably the only solution is to address the demand side, but even with a concerted effort, this will probably take a generation,” Kamler said. “As long as there is demand and prices for bushmeat remain high, local people will continue to trap even if they have other livelihoods.”
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Source: www.newscientist.com
