Wildlife Damage Control: Principles for Managing Vertebrate Pests

Vertebrate pests cause problems in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, to human and animal health and safety and to human recreation. The types of wildlife damage are many and varied, and can be costly. Until now, there has been little effort to identify and evaluate generalities across that broad range of species, methods and topics. This book is an attempt to do so. Wildlife Damage Control promotes principle-based thinking about managing impact. It documents and discusses the key principles underlying wildlife damage and its control, and demonstrates their application to real-life topics - how they have been used in management actions or how they could be tested in the future. It synthesises the wide but diffuse literature dealing with the impacts of vertebrate pests and encourages readers to adopt a more theoretical framework for thinking about pest impacts and ways to manage them. The book is organised around key principles that apply across species, rather than looking at individual species, and is damage-based not pest animal-based. The book is planned to complement the species-based approach used in other books. production, and in human and animal health. Within each chapter there are exercises designed to help readers learn and evaluate key principles. This book identifies generic principles in the science of wildlife damage control, taking a world-wide perspective. It gives practical demonstrations of the underlying principles and provides worked examples of impact measurement. It also synthesises theory and application to guide management planning and provide a framework for readers to think about pest impacts.