Human hunters and nonhuman predators: Fundamental differences.

The article in PNAS entitled, “How constraints affect the hunter’s decision to shoot a deer,” (1) develops and tests an extremely useful model of the way deer hunters behave in Norway. The authors, Diekert et al. (1), find that hunters, constrained by the number of deer that they can kill, by the number of days that they can hunt, and by social norms, adjust their selectivity regarding the animals they shoot. As costs rise and constraints tighten, they become less selective in the manner predicted by an optimal stopping model (2). The analysis also recognizes that objectives (recreation, provision of meat, or deer population reduction) differ among hunters, and that such differences affect the hunters’ selections of deer prey. These findings should generalize qualitatively to hunters from other nations and of other game.