Allmänningens tragedi: Djurutrotning edition

Anders Bolling i Framstegsbloggen:

För att återvända till Nordamerikas prärier skedde under 1800-talet en exempellös jakt på bisonoxen, och några tusen nybyggarjägare med de enkla handeldvapen som fanns då lyckades med arméns och järnvägsbolagens stöd slakta ner beståndet av det stora hovdjuret från 60 miljoner individer ner till 800 (!) innan kongressen satte stopp.

Jag har tidigare varit inne på det här temat, men där Stossels argument i tigerfallet lämnade en del att önska så är det betydligt bättre anpassat till bisonoxen - ur ett Stossel-inlägg:

A hundred years ago, American bison were almost extinct. Why? Because no one owned them and had the incentive to protect them. People just killed them.

Then ranchers began to fence in the bison and farm them. Today, America has half a million bison.

Han nämner inte mer om bixonoxen än så, men Wikipedia utvecklar en smula:

The famous herd of James "Scotty" Philip in South Dakota was one of the earliest reintroductions of bison to North America. In 1899, Phillip purchased a small herd (five of them, including the female) from Dug Carlin, Pete Dupree's brother-in-law, whose son Fred had roped five calves in the Last Big Buffalo Hunt on the Grand River in 1881 and taken them back home to the ranch on the Cheyenne River. Scotty's goal was to preserve the animal from extinction. At the time of his death in 1911 at 53, Philip had grown the herd to an estimated 1,000 to 1,200 head of bison. A variety of privately owned herds had also been established, starting from this population.

Simultaneously, two Montana ranchers, Michel Pablo and Charles Allard, spent more than 20 years assembling one of the largest collections of purebred bison on the continent (by the time of Allard's death in 1896, the herd numbered 300). In 1907, after U.S. authorities declined to buy the herd, Pablo struck a deal with the Canadian government and shipped most of his bison northward to the newly created Elk Island National Park.

Bolling övervärderar alltså kraftigt lagstiftarnas roll i det hela; på samma sätt räddades den vita noshörningen just via äganderätten, vilket också Stossel nämner:

In Africa, rhinos were disappearing because poachers killed them for their horns, considered an aphrodisiac. African governments banned the products, but this did little good. A black market, complete with official corruption, arose. The government's game wardens took bribes or slept on the job.

"It was a complete failure," says Dr. Brian Child, who spent 20 years in Africa working to save endangered species. "Wildlife was disappearing everywhere."

What finally worked, he says, was letting landowners own rhinos so they could make money off them from tourism. Suddenly, each tribe had skin in the game, and an incentive to protect its own rhinos.

Och ur Saving African Rhinos: A Market Success Story (pdf), via Mark J. Perry [klickbar för förstoring]:

Figure 2 shows trends in white rhino numbers from 1960 until 2007. Contrast those numbers with the black rhino, which mostly lived in African countries with weak or absent wildlife market institutions such as Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia. In 1960, about 100,000 black rhinos roamed across Africa, but by the early 1990s poachers had reduced their numbers to less than 2,500.

Ovanstående metoder må vara kontraintuitiva för många, men ekonomi handlar om hushållning, och alternativet är allmänningens tragedi - även när det gäller djur; Comixed visar viss förståelse för grundproblemet:


Tidigare inlägg på temat:
- John Stossel: "För att rädda tigern - ät den"