Snaring and wildlife wastage in Africa: drivers, scale, impacts, and paths to sustainability.

Abstract

Snaring is considered to be the most common form of hunting in Africa. Although snaring can provide hunters with valuable food and income, it can also devastate wildlife populations when practiced unsustainably and has significant animal welfare implications. Snaring can also be wasteful, both when animals escape with fatal injuries and when catch is discarded. In the present article, we argue that snaring is a regional-scale threat to wildlife and to the sustainable use of biodiversity in Africa. We show that snaring in Africa is geographically widespread and locally intense, that tens of millions of snares are likely set across the continent annually, and that at least 100 million kilograms of wild meat is probably wasted in Africa every year because of snaring. We discuss opportunities to address these impacts through changes to governance and enforcement and by reducing demand for wild meat in cities.