Markets Have Neither Conscience Nor Foresight
Wildlife must remain a public resource if it is to survive
At the dawn of the twentieth century, wildlife across North America faced certain extinction at the hands of rapacious, unfettered markets. Desperate to avert a total collapse, our forebears made a radical break from existing legal doctrines to create a new system of laws that would protect wildlife from market exploitation. Future scholars would come to know this system as the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation.
Today, the North American Model stands as arguably the greatest success story of environmental policy in global history. It resurrected an entire continent of wildlife, providing a foundation that supports billions of dollars of sustainable industry and provides sustainable food to countless families and communities, particularly among North America’s Indigenous peoples.
It is the singular mission of the Alliance for Public Wildlife to defend this extraordinary living legacy, and to demand that our elected leaders do the same.
Unfortunately, the history of this system is almost unknown, and its benefits taken for granted. By the mid-1980s, profit-based schemes in multiple states and provinces sought to reverse virtually all of the pillars of the North American Model. These schemes not only allowed the return of markets for dead wildlife, they promoted domestication, genetic engineering, and habitat capture. Warnings from scientists, experts, and hunter and conservation organizations were ignored.
Today, accelerating erosion of the North American Model threatens disaster on multiple fronts.
Almost every infectious disease that afflicts humans today originally came from animals, and almost always as a result of husbandry and domestication. Throughout history, captivity has been shown to incubate and amplify pathogens, fostering epidemics and trans-species transfers that are extremely difficult to detect, control or treat, and impossible to contain. Repeated 'spillover' events have spread these diseases to wild populations, traditional livestock, and people.
Schemes to domesticate and commercially exploit wildlife have already produced a number of serious epidemics in the modern era, most recently COVID19 from wet markets in China. But North American game farming has fostered a vastly more dangerous threat waiting in the wings: Chronic Wasting Disease.
For more information on CWD and its potential risks to humans, please visit our publications page.
Human Health
Privatization schemes threaten the survival of wildlife in myriad ways.
First and foremost, the disease threats from these schemes are even more dangerous for wildlife than they are for humans. Wild animals held in captivity experience severe and chronic stress that compromises their immune system. With reduced resistance to disease, animals held in high density captive pens allow infectious diseases to spread quickly to all susceptible animals. They are exposed to a variety of pathogens and parasites, including new ones from our domestics which wild species have no resistance to. Spillover from captive wildlife facilities is constant and near-inevitable, and any contact between wild and farmed members of a species carries a risk of transmitting potentially devastating pathogens to the wild population. This problem is not theoretical; piscine orthoreovirus (PRV) transmitted from farmed salmon is growing rapidly in wild salmon populations in British Columbia. Chronic Wasting Disease has spread into cervid populations across the continent because of game farming, and threatens them with potential extinction.
Escapes from captive wildlife facilities also carry a more long-term risk of genetic pollution. Commercial exploitation in captivity inevitably leads to increasing degrees of domestication of a species. Simply removing aggressive, “problem” animals from a herd or breeding prized animals more frequently is enough to introduce permanent changes into the bodies and brains of a population. When those animals breed with wild populations, they introduce those altered traits, which can negatively affect the health and survival of the wild populations.
The other major threat from captive wildlife operations is the loss of habitat for wild populations. One of the major benefits touted by proponents of these schemes is that they make use of so-called “marginal land.” From the perspective of wildlife, though, these lands are not marginal at all; they’re the best remaining habitats available. Placing captive wildlife operations on land where those same species naturally thrive is intuitive, but inevitably zero-sum. And therein lies the rub, because the desperate proposals to mitigate the first two problems, like larger facilities to reduce density and higher and less permeable fencing to reduce escapes and passthrough exposure, require even greater loss of habitat.
Wildlife Health
Far from stifling industry, enshrining wildlife as a sustainable, public resource created a dynamo of economic growth. Entire industries were created to satisfy new markets, designing, producing, and selling a mountain of outdoor equipment and providing all manner of services for hundreds of millions of people to enjoy, connect with, and draw sustenance from public wildlife. In 2022, the combined economic activity from hunting, fishing, and wildlife associated recreation added 395 billion dollars to US GDP—nearly double the 223 billion contributed by all of America’s farms the same year.
Schemes to commercialize and privatize wildlife are minuscule in comparison. Even basic economic analysis concludes that the farming of non-domestic terrestrial species will never have a future; demand is incredibly limited, costs are enormous, and its only significant profits are derived from selling breeding stock to new people who’ve been lured into the industry—a quintessential pyramid scheme. And yet these schemes still threaten the survival of wildlife, and the far larger and vastly more sustainable industries it supports.
The most serious economic threat, though, is from diseases like CWD that these industries foster. Recent studies have found that CWD infection is possible just from an animal eating plants grown in CWD-infected soil. As with CWD-infected meat, there is no process which can make CWD-infected plants safe to consume. Cooking, baking, pickling, fermenting, pasteurization, and even complete incineration are all totally ineffective at deactivating CWD prions. In light of this, the prospect of trade barriers like those targeting beef from Alberta and the UK in the 2000s being applied to all North American agricultural products is very real, even without a human case.
For more information on the current and potential economic effects of CWD, please visit our publications page.