Wildlife Reserves, Populations, and Hunting Outcome with Smart Wildlife

We consider a hunting area and a wildlife reserve and answer the question: How does clever migration decision affect the social optimal and the private optimal hunting levels and population stocks? We analyze this in a model allowing for two-way migration between hunting and reserve areas, where the populations’ migration decisions depend on both hunting pressure and relative population densities. In the social optimum a pure stress effect on the behavior of smart wildlife exists. This implies that the population level in the wildlife reserve tends to increase and the population level in the hunting area and hunting levels tend to decrease. On the other hand, the effect on stock tends to reduce the population in the wildlife reserve and increase the population in the hunting area and thereby also increase hunting. In the case of the private optimum, open-access is assumed and we find that the same qualitative results arise when comparing a situation with and without stress effects, but of course at a higher level of hunting. We also show that when net social benefits of hunting dominate the net social benefits of populations, wildlife reserves are optimally placed in areas of low carrying capacity and vice versa.