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Livestock and Carnivores: Economic and Ecological Interactions

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Abstract

Carnivores-livestock interactions cause human-wildlife conflicts worldwide. These interactions are present under a wide range of ecological and economic circumstances. This paper studies the relationship between predation mortality and natural mortality, when food availability affects natural mortality of the livestock. Semi-domestic Saami reindeer (Rangifer t. tarandus) herding in Norway is used as a case study. When predation affects reindeer density, food competition among reindeer changes, which changes weights and natural mortality in the reindeer population. An age-structured bio-economic model is presented, where this relationship is taken into account. While predation mortality may be additional to natural mortality in absence of food limitation, it can compensate for natural mortality in situations of food scarcity. Furthermore, due to density dependency in livestock weights, predation may increase the meat value of livestock. The paper analyzes how predation affects livestock production and economic performance under an optimized management scheme. One main result is that predation shifts the optimal harvesting composition towards calf harvesting and, therefore, the optimal stock composition among the different categories of animals. This contrasts findings in the existing bioeconomic literature. Furthermore, a changing harvesting pattern towards calf harvest is an important adjustment that highly limits the negative impact on profit of predation.

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Notes

  1. One management unit typically covers several reindeer owners, usually relatives of the unit manager. In western Finnmark, our case study area, there are on average 6 owners per management unit (Johannesen and Skonhoft 2011).

  2. Exchange rate: 1 EUR = 9.25 NOK (Sept. 2016).

  3. In reality, predation and natural mortality generally take place simultaneously. However, by sequencing the events over the annual cycle the model becomes analytically and numerically tractable. We have also studied the model when predation takes place before natural mortality. This causes a change in the distribution of losses from natural mortality to predation mortality, but has a negligible impact on the remaining results, as long as (slaughter) weights, and hence, the fertility rate and natural survival rates, depend on the autumn stock size.

  4. Instead of using the total number of animals as density measure, we could weigh calves and adults according to, e.g., their energy intake. However, ecological studies frequently also use the total number of animals as a density measure when analyzing factors affecting animal weights (e.g., Bårdsen et al. 2010) or vegetation biomass (e.g., Kumpula et al. 2014).

  5. Notice also that harvesting mortality has the same compensatory effect as predation mortality.

  6. The model is solved using the Knitro solver engine (version 10.0) bundled with the Premium solver platform from Frontline systems. The stability and uniqueness of the steady states are checked by the global optimization tool Multistart. The Multistart runs the nonlinear solver a series of times, and the Multistart method`s Bayesian test determines that all locally optimal solutions are probably found. In addition, the Interval Global Solver is used to check that the baseline steady state found is a global optimum.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491, Trondheim, Norway

    Anne Borge Johannesen & Anders Skonhoft

  2. NTNU Business School, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491, Trondheim, Norway

    Jon Olaf Olaussen

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  1. Anne Borge Johannesen
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Correspondence to Anne Borge Johannesen.

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Johannesen, A.B., Olaussen, J.O. & Skonhoft, A. Livestock and Carnivores: Economic and Ecological Interactions. Environ Resource Econ 74, 295–317 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-019-00318-x

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