Estimating hunting prevalence and reliance on wild meat in Cambodia's Eastern Plains


HARRIET I BB ETT,AIDAN KEA NE,ANDREW D.M. DOB SON,OLL Y GRIFFIN HENRY TRAVERS and E . J . MIL NE R-GULLAND


Abstract Hunting is a primary driver of biodiversity loss across South-east Asia. Within Cambodia, the use of wire snares to capture wildlife is a severe threat in protected areas but there have been few studies of the behaviour of hunters from local communities. Here, we combine the unmatched count technique with direct questioning to estimate the prevalence of hunting behaviours and wildlife consumption amongst 705 households living within Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary, Cambodia. We assessed respon- dents’ knowledge of rules, and their perceptions of patrols responsible for enforcing rules. Estimates of hunting be- haviour were variable: results from the unmatched count technique were inconclusive, and direct questioning re- vealed 9%of households hunted, and 20%set snares around farms to prevent wildlife eating crops. Hunting with domes- tic dogs was the method most commonly used to catch wildlife (87% of households owned dogs). Wild meat was consumed by 84% of households, and was most frequently bought or caught, but also gifted. Wedetected a high aware- ness of conservation rules, but low awareness of punish- ments and penalties, with wildlife depletion, rather than the risk of being caught by patrols, causing the greatest reduction in hunting. Our findings demonstrate the chal- lenges associated with reliably estimating rule-breaking behaviour and highlight the need to incorporate careful triangulation into study design.


Keywords Bushmeat, Cambodia, law enforcement, poach- ing, protected areas, ranger patrols, snares, unmatched count technique


Supplementary material for this article is available at doi.org/10.1017/S0030605319001455


Introduction


have decreased bird and mammal abundances by 58 and 83%, respectively, in some tropical areas (Benitez-Lopez et al., 2017). The situation is particularly severe in South- east Asia, where most large wild vertebrate species have declined substantially throughout their remaining ranges (Sodhi et al., 2004; Harrison et al., 2016). Here, forests are increasingly considered empty; i.e. devoid of all but the smallest or most common species (Harrison, 2011), with overexploitation facilitated by advancements in hunting technologies, rapid economic growth and improved access to forested areas (Harrison et al., 2016; Hughes, 2017). Cambodia is one of the most biodiverse countries in


H HARRIET IBBETT (Corresponding author, orcid.org/0000-0003-1213-4834),


HENRY TRAVERS and E. J. MILNER-GULLAND Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3SZ, UK. E-mail harriet.ibbett@bangor.ac.uk


AIDAN KEANE and ANDREW D. M. DOBSON School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK


OLLY GRIFFIN Wildlife Conservation Society—Cambodia Programme, Phnom Penh, Cambodia


Received 17 September 2019. Revision requested 13 November 2019. Accepted 9 December 2019. First published online 23 October 2020.


South-east Asia (Daltry, 2008) and is legally one of the best protected, with 34% of terrestrial land area afforded protected status (Souter et al., 2016).However, in reality pro- tected areas are chronically underfunded, overexploitation of natural resources is widespread, and laws are weakly en- forced (Souter et al., 2016). Hunting has probably driven the kouprey Bos sauveli to extinction, extirpated the Javan rhinoceros Rhinoceros sondaicus and tiger Panthera tigris (O’Kelly et al., 2012), and continues to threaten the viability of many other species (Starr et al., 2011;O’Kelly et al., 2012; Rostro-García et al., 2016). Cambodia has a high prevalence of hunting and reliance on wild meat, with an estimated 83% of rural households engaged in some form of harvest of wild animals at least once per year (Nielsen et al., 2018). Snares are widely used; in 2015, 27,714 were removed by patrols in Cambodia’s South Cardamoms National Park (Gray et al., 2016), with true snare abundance probably much higher, as experimental studies suggest only a small proportion of snares set are found by rangers (O’Kelly et al., 2018; Ibbett et al., 2020). Usually made from wire, cable or nylon, snares are affordable, accessible, and have limited selectivity with respect to animals’ species, sex or age (Noss, 1998). Once set, they can trap a wide range of arboreal and terrestrial species (Borgerson, 2015; Ingram et al., 2017) and, although animals occasionally escape, subsequent non-fatal injuries often jeopardize long-term survival (Yersin et al., 2017). The impact of hunting on Cambodia’s fauna is well docu-


mented (Harrison et al., 2016), but there is less empirical information about hunters, their hunting methods, and local demand for wildlife products (but see Martin & Phipps, 1996; Loucks et al., 2009; Coad et al., 2019). This


This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work. Oryx, 2021, 55(6), 878–888 © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605319001455


unting threatens 25% of terrestrial mammal species globally (Ripple et al., 2016), and is estimated to


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