What is Wildlife Management?

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What is Wildlife Management? The art of making
land produce sustained, annual crops of wild
game for recreational use Aldo Leopold. 1933.
Game Management. Leopolds Tools of the
Wildlife Manager Ax, Plow, Cow, Fire and Gun

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The science and art of making decisions and
taking action to manipulate the structure,
dynamics and relations of populations, habitats
and people to achieve specific human objectives
by means of the wildlife resource Practically
speaking, the wildlife manager works for
particular wildlife users the rightness of
managerial decisions can only be judged relative
to the employers objectives R. H. Giles, Jr.
1978. Wildlife Management. W.H. Freeman, San
Francisco. 416 pp.
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Wildlife management is the application of
ecological knowledge to populations of
vertebrate animals and their plant and animal
associates in a manner that strikes a balance
between the needs of those populations and the
needs of people. Bolen and Robinson.
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Diagram
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3 of Leopolds 5 theorems 1. The recreational
value of a head of game is inverse to the
artificiality of its origin 2. A proper
game policy seeks a happy medium between the
intensity of management necessary and that which
would deteriorate its quality or recreational
value. 3. The denser the human population the
more intense the system of game management
needed to supply the same proportion of people
with hunting.
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• Social significance of game management
• Leopold, Game Management, 1933 p 420
• The game manager manipulates animals and
  vegetation to produce a game crop.
• This, however, is only a superficial indication
  of his social significance.
• What he really labors for is to bring about a new
  attitude toward the land.
• In short, 20 centuries of progress have
  brought the average citizen a vote,
• a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account and a
  high opinion of himself,
• but not the capacity to live in high density
  without befouling and denuding
• his environment, nor a conviction that such
  capacity, rather than such density,
• is the true test of whether he is civilized.
• The practice of game management may be one of the
  means of developing a
• culture which will meet that test.