Hunting Threatens 25% of Animals with Extinction David Kirby - TakePart
go to original October 23, 2016

10 Animals That Will be Hunted Into Extinction (Top10Archive)

The hunting of wildlife for bushmeat has become a “global crisis” that threatens to wipe out more than 300 species, or a quarter of all threatened terrestrial mammal species on Earth, a first-of-its-kind study released last week warned.

Among the world’s largest land mammals, 60 percent are at risk of extinction from human consumption, researchers found.

“This is the first global assessment of mammal hunting and results show evidence of a global crisis,” the authors wrote in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

“Many forests, savannahs, grasslands, and deserts in the developing world are now becoming ‘empty landscapes,’ ” they added. “Only bold changes will substantially diminish the imminent possibility of humans consuming many of the world’s wild mammals to the point of functional or global extinction.”

Said study lead author William Ripple, distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University: “These were surprising results and alarming results. I wasn’t expecting to find so many species where the major threat is hunting. If we go ahead with business as usual, we’re going to have many regions suffering from a lack of animals.”

The species being pushed toward extinction by illegal and unregulated hunting include clouded leopards, tigers, Bactrian camels, long-beaked echidnas, and pangolins.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists one-fourth of the world’s roughly 4,500 land mammals as threatened with extinction. Ripple and his team analyzed individual species from the list and identified 301 threatened mammal species for which a primary threat is being shot or trapped by humans.

The main reason for the hunting is to obtain meat for food, followed by medicinal products, ornamental use, and the live-pet trade.

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