Game Management

Game management is the branch of wildlife management concerned with those animals that humans hunt for sport and food. Most familiarly, game management takes the form of laws that control hunting and fishing activities. It may also involve programs for maintaining a good balance between predators and prey in a given area, for establishing game preserves and wildlife refuges, and for stocking or restocking areas with desired game species.

The first forms of game control were those established in various communities in order to protect the hunting prerogatives of leaders and aristocrats. Gamekeepers were often employed to keep away poachers and to punish those who were caught, sometimes by death. Such efforts, however, were exercises in privilege rather than attempts to manage game in the modern sense of the term.

Wider concern about the preservation of game stocks arose only in the 19th century with the rapid expansion of areas settled by humans, and particularly with the extermination or near- extermination of various species by over-hunting. Since the mid-19th century various governments have been enacting increasingly stringent game laws and game management programs. For example, game laws may establish a hunting season whose time limits are determined by the breeding cycle of a species. In addition, based on observing the state of species in the wild, limits may be set on how many animals a hunter may kill, or the total number killed in a given area.

Game management must also take matters of ecological balance into careful consideration, because human activities readily upset natural systems. For example, predators are often considered pest species and tend to be poorly protected from overkill. As a result, game animals that are their prey may overpopulate an area, leading to mass starvation. One way of dealing with this has been to permit temporary mass slaughters of game animals. Other measures have included control of herd size by shooting the animals with hormonal darts to sterilize them. The more long-range effort would be to try to redress the damage done to a region's predator-prey balance. Even the establishment of preserves to protect threatened species may offer hazards of ecological imbalance, once the animals begin to breed in number. Similarly, proposals to introduce a desired game species into a new area should be studied with care before being adopted, using all available information resources in doing so

Keeping

The keeping of wild animals in captivity began in ancient times, with the domestication of wild animals during the Stone Age. The first real zoos can be traced back at least as far as the 12th century BC in China. Powerful rulers collected exotic animals for their own amusement, to impress foreign visitors, and to display some of the marvels of nature. Collections of captive animals were also kept in ancient Greece and Rome, where most were used for competition between man and beast.