Endangered Species - Private Farming

Private Farming

Whereas poaching causes substantial reductions in endangered animal populations, legal private farming for profit has the opposite effect. Legal private farming has caused substantial increases in the populations of both the southern black rhinoceros and the southern white rhinoceros. Dr Richard Emslie, a scientific officer at the IUCN, said of such programs, "Effective law enforcement has become much easier now that the animals are largely privately owned... We have been able to bring local communities into the conservation programmes. There are increasingly strong economic incentives attached to looking after rhinos rather than simply poaching: from eco-tourism or selling them on for a profit. So many owners are keeping them secure. The private sector has been key to helping our work."

Conservation experts view the effect of China's turtle farming on the wild turtle populations of China and South-Eastern Asia—many of which are endangered—as "poorly understood". While they commend the gradual replacement of wild-caught turtles with farm-raised turtles in the marketplace (the percentage of farm-raised individuals in the "visible" trade grew from around 30% in 2000 to around 70% in 2007), they are concerned with the fact that a lot of wild animals are caught to provide farmers with breeding stock. As the conservation expert Peter Paul van Dijk noted, turtle farmers often believe in the superiority of wild-caught animals as the breeding stock, which may create an incentive for turtle hunters to seek and catch the very last remaining wild specimens of some endangered turtle species.

In 2009, researchers in Australia managed for the first time to coax southern bluefin tuna to breed in landlocked tanks, opening up the possibility of using fish farming as a way to save the species from the problems of overfishing in the wild.