Commercial hunting appears to be the overriding cause of the virtual extinction
of the muskoxen on the Canadian mainland. Legislative protection successfully
reversed the trend. Muskoxen now number about 15,000 on the mainland and have
reoccupied almost all of their historic range (Reynolds 1998). The conservative hunt-
ing quotas introduced in the 1970s did not stop that recovery.Recreational hunting is intrinsically safer than commercial hunting because sport hunters
operate on an implicit discount rate of zero. Sport hunting hence has an enviable
record of conserving hunted stocks. Instances of gross overexploitation are rare but
not unknown. The overhunting of the “forty-mile” caribou herd in Yukon has
already been described in Section 10.7.1.The Arabian oryx
The Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx) is a spectacular antelope whose demise in the wild
and its subsequent re-establishment from captive stock is related by Stanley Price
(1989) and Gordon (1991). Its original distribution appears to have included most
of the Arabian Peninsula, but by the end of the nineteenth century the remaining
Arabian oryx were divided into two populations. A northern group lived in and around
the sand desert of north Saudi Arabia known as the Great Nafud and a southern group
occupied the Rub’ al Khali (the Empty Quarter) of southern Arabia.
The northern population became extinct about 1950. The range of the southern
population declined from about 400,000 km^2 in 1930, to 250,000 km^2 in 1950, to
10,000 km^2 in 1970. Within the next couple of years the population was reduced to
six animals in a single herd. They were shot out on October 18, 1972.
Recreational hunting caused this extinction. The countries of the Arabian
Peninsula are essentially sea frontages, the inland boundaries being little more than
lines on a map. There is little control over activities in the hinterlands. Oil company
employees and their followers used company trucks for hunting trips and seemed to
have been at least partly responsible for the decline. Then there were the large motor-
ized hunting expeditions originating mainly from Saudi Arabia. These were self-
contained convoys that included fuel and water tankers. The vehicles and support
facilities allowed large areas to be swept each day with efficient removal of the wildlife.
Their main quarry was bustards and hares secured by hawking, but gazelles and Arabian
oryx were also chased. One such party crossed into the Aden Protectorate (now the
People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen) in 1961 and killed 48 Arabian oryx, about
half the population of that region. In the 1960s large parties from Qatar would each
year capture Arabian oryx with nets in the hinterland of Oman, trucking them the
900 km back to replenish the captive herd of Shaikh Kasim bin Hamid.Hawaiian birds
More bird species have been introduced to the Hawaiian islands than to any other
comparable land area. Of 162 species introduced, 45 are fully established and 25 have
secured at least a foothold (Scott et al. 1986). These exotic species have been sug-
gested as one of the causes of the decline and extinction of the native birds.
Mountainspring and Scott (1985) estimated the geographic association within
pairs of the more common small- to medium-sized insectivorous forest passerines.
After statistically removing the effect of habitat they showed that a higher propor-
tion of exotic/native pairs of forest birds were negatively associated than were pairs318 Chapter 18
18.2.6The effect of
unregulated
recreational hunting
18.2.7The effect of
competition with
introduced species