Managing wildlife ethics issues ethically

Abstract

Wildlifers seldom write about ethics, yet ethical issues are among the most intractable of wildlife management issues. Society's value orientations about wildlife have been changing slowly over the last several decades. An increasingly urbanized and educated population no longer unequivocally supports wildlife management programs that tend to regard wildlife as utilitarian objects. State wildlife agencies and their employees have been slow to acknowledge and respond to social changes and accommodate them into wildlife management programs. As a result, traditional wildlife management hunting and trapping practices increasingly have become subjects of ballot initiatives. Younger, more idealistic employees often embrace and reflect wildlife protection philosophies, bringing them into conflict with agency administrators and traditional clients. Forced to choose between loyalty to ideals and loyalty to authority, many exit. Resolving ethical issues requires ethics rooted in fundamental democratic values. Wildlife agencies will learn to manage issues of wildlife ethics when they rediscover democracy.

Keywords:

• Social change
• conflict
• value orientations
• wildlife policymaking
• democracy