A professional hunter (less frequently referred to as market or commercial hunter and regionally, especially in Britain and Ireland, as professional stalker or gamekeeper) is a person who Hunting and/or manages game by profession. Some professional hunters work in the private sector or for government agencies and manage species that are considered overabundant,
Australia
In Australia several million
are shot each year by licensed professional hunters in
Culling programmes, with both their meat and hides sold.
Germany
German professional hunters (
Berufsjäger or
Berufsjägerinnen depending on gender) mostly work for large private forest estates and for state-owned forest enterprises, where they control browsing by reducing the numbers of ungulates like
roe deer or
chamois, manage populations of sought-after trophy species like
red deer and act as hunting guides for paying clients.
Southern and Eastern Africa
Historically, professional big-game hunters of European descent who plied their trade in Africa, especially during the first half of the 20th century, are often referred to as "
" or "great white hunters".
The countries of Southern and Eastern Africa, especially Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, are major destinations for big-game hunting tourism in Africa.
Local professional hunters, often simply referred to as
PH, act as hunting guides for paying guest hunters and manage safari hunting businesses.
United Kingdom
British professional stalkers and gamekeepers primarily work on large estates, especially in the Scottish Highlands, where they most commonly manage red deer,
common pheasant,
red grouse and French partridge.
Early in the 20th century there were an estimated 25,000 professional stalkers and gamekeepers employed in the UK,
while today there are some 3000.
United States
Unregulated hunting in the 19th and early 20th century
In a North American context the terms market hunter and commercial hunter are predominantly used to refer to hunters of the 19th and early 20th century who sold or traded the flesh, bones, skins and feathers of slain animals as a source of income. These hunters focused on species which gathered in large numbers for breeding, feeding, or migration and were organized into
factory-like groups that would systematically depopulate an area of any valuable
wildlife over a short period of time. The animals which were hunted included
American bison,
deer,
and other
waterfowl,
goose,
and many other
,
pinniped and
,
fish, river
, and
.
Populations of large birds were severely depleted through the 19th and early 20th century. The extermination of several species and the threatened loss of others caused popular legislation effectively prohibiting this form of commercial hunting in the United States. were eventually established to conserve surviving wildlife and allow a certain amount of recovery and re-population to occur. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act signed in 1918 regulated hunting and prohibited all hunting of until 1941 and until 1962.
Federal and States agencies
Agencies like the federal Wildlife Services (not to be confused with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service), part of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), and its equivalents on the state level employ professional hunters for lethal as well as non-lethal control of wildlife, for example, dealing with wildlife preying on
livestock (or humans) and engaging in
bird control to prevent
.
The federal Wildlife Services alone has a staff of around 750 professional hunters.
It works on around 565 airports around the United States to identify and reduce threats posed by bird strikes.
See also
Sources
-
Dickson, Barney., Hutton, Jonathan., Adams, W. M. (2009). Recreational Hunting, Conservation and Rural Livelihoods. (= Conservation Science and Practice). Wiley-Blackwell, .
-
Gissibl, B. (2016). The conservation of luxury: Safari hunting and the consumption of wildlife in twentieth-century East Africa. In K. Hofmeester & B. Grewe (Eds.), Luxury in Global Perspective: Objects and Practices, 1600–2000 ( Studies in Comparative World History, pp. 263–300). Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316257913.011.
-
Jacoby, Karl (2001). Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. Berkeley: University of California Press, .
-
Lovelock, Brent (2007). Tourism and the consumption of wildlife: hunting, shooting and sport fishing. London: Routledge. .
-
van der Merwe, Peet; du Plessis, Lindie (2014). Game farming and hunting tourism. African Sun Media. .
External links
