INTRODUCTION

The use of wildlife remains in something of a cleft stick as a possible solution to contemporary problems in conservation (Hutton and Leader-Williams, 2003), such as offsetting the costs of conflict between people and wildlife. On the one hand, the list of abuses suffered by many species of wildlife when used commercially seems endless (Milner-Gulland and Mace 1998; Bennett and Robinson 2000). At the same time, the Convention on Biological Diversity promotes the role of sustainable use in providing people with the necessary incentives to conserve biodiversity on land, which ultimately requires decisions about the opportunity costs of different forms of land use (McNeely 1988, Swanson 1994; Hutton and Leader-Williams 2003; Convention on Biological Diversity 2005).

The Convention on Biological Diversity has, nevertheless, based its aspirations on situations where wise use has led to positive incentives for conservation. For example, the catastrophic losses of native species after the colonization of North America led sportsmen to protect their interests in the early and mid nineteenth century, by seeking to reduce the numbers of game animals killed and establish preserves (Gray 1993). Sportsmen who fished and hunted for pleasure, rather than for commerce or necessity, became one spearhead for formal policies to conserve wildlife and its habitats (Reiger 1986; Jackson 1996). Likewise, following the colonization of Africa, formal conservation policies in many countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century sought to regulate hunting and to establish game reserves (MacKenzie 1988; Leader-Williams 2000), and subsequently in southern Africa to re-establish species on private land to create further hunting opportunities (Bothma 2002; Lewis and Jackson, Chapter 15).