The future of wildlife is at stake.

Until we start harvesting game populations responsibly, we will never be able to manage wildlife in a sustainable manner.

This article takes an indepth look at the effects of over and under shooting game populations.

And, most importantly, what we should be doing instead.

This article looks at adaptive management in wildlife conservation and provides a guide for the most optimum system of game management.

Hunting has been carried out for centuries and continues to play a vital part in the management of wildlife. Passed on through generations upon generations of families, it is still an important tradition.

However, if we want to continue, we need to proactively participate in responsible and accountable management based on numbers and facts. Because whether we like it or not, game management is about the numbers, year-by-year, season-by-season.

So, what numbers should we be collecting?

And what can we do with them?

In this article here at HAMS we are going to take a look at what monitoring and data collection means for wildlife management and what we can do with these numbers.

And lastly, why it’s so darn important.

Hunting has always been a way of life, it has dominated the course of human evolution for millions of years and is still a way of life for many millions of people closely connected to nature and the animal world.

It is also common knowledge that our ancestors were hunter-gatherers who used tools to obtain food, however, what is less commonly known is that the laws to manage animal populations were only established much, much later when modern humans noticed that certain species had started to decline, and in some cases, disappear.

So, in light of this knowledge, what would be the consequences if we stopped hunting?

What would happen to the wildlife populations and the land they live on if, as many that are opposed to hunting, we stopped intervening?

We often talk about how to manage wildlife populations, and we’ve even discussed these topics in some length here on HAMS Blog. However, we quite often fail to fully discuss one of the most important topics: what are the requirements for having a specific type of game on our land, what are the features of the habitat they require and what should we do to get the most out of our land?

So, in this article, we are going to take a look at what habitat actually is and how important good habitat management is when managing our game populations.

Now more than ever, we need to focus on protecting our planet and the conservation of it. With one of the main problems being climate change, with every year that passes we are losing more and more species to extinction. Understandably, we are becoming more concerned about the future of both ours and the next generation’s lives.

Some blame politics for this; some blame our way of living, some say that hunting contributes to it, and some of us, we take action…

But how can we take action? What can we do to play our part?

Well, as part of our ongoing series today we are going to look at wildlife management and ask what exactly is wildlife management, what role does is play in conservation, and how can hunting help in the fight against biodiversity loss, and... finally, is it really that important?

A look at how the British shooting and hunting community has reacted to the recent licensing issues. 

There are many aspects of successful game management, some of them are straightforward and obvious, whilst others are less clear and often induce heated but professional debate.

Falling into the latter is the necessity and various methods of predator control.

Let's take a closer look at this contradictory topic.

In this following series of new articles we are going to introduce you to various different deer management methods and systems from around the world where deer plays an important role in wildlife management.

There are a number of very different approaches to this topic in various countries and here we are simply presenting them rather than saying whether one is better than another. All of the management systems we will discuss can be appropriate under certain circumstances and each one has been developed to suit the different biological, ecological, economical and anthropological influences of the area where they are practiced.

We can all learn something from each of them. It is up to you, how you use the information presented here.

Ok, so now we’ve gotten the “disclaimer” out the way let’s start with our first country, Austria.

Let’s be clear, hunting isn’t poaching

Unfortunately, to some people hunting and poaching are starting to become synonymous, but one does certainly not equate to the other. But it is one of the main reasons why the reputation of hunting and hunters is in free fall these days.