Middle East
Aug 15, 2007


KEBABBLE
Pay to prey
By Fazile Zahir

"However many types of hunting a hunter knows, a bear knows just as many escape routes." - Turkish proverb

FETHIYE, Turkey - The Turkish Ministry of the Environment and Central Hunting Commission recently announce its 2007-08 hunting fines. Editors are never happy to miss an arresting headline, so Hurriyet newspaper jazzed up the news with a picture of a large brown bear sitting with its paw raised toward the article titled "Permission to kill - 18,000 liras" (US$14,000).

The fines depend on the rarity of the animals. Killing an Anatolian leopard nets the highest fine on the list at 35,000 liras ($27,000), but that sum is largely irrelevant, as most wildlife organizations suspect that the breed is already extinct because of trophy



hunting in the 1980s and 1990s. Second in the pantheon come fallow deer, red deer, wild sheep (Anatolian and other), and Asian brown bears, which will each set you back 18,000 liras. Brown-bear populations in Turkey have not been subject to detailed surveys, but it is known that outside of four core areas in the east of the country, their numbers have been declining rapidly as forests decrease in size, human populations increase, and expanded road networks allow man to invade what was previously secluded bear habitat.

Next on the list are spotted hyenas at 12,000 liras and the Mediterranean monk seal at 8,000 liras. Considering there are only about 400 monk seals in the Mediterranean and only about 50 in Turkey, and that the animal is listed as "critically endangered" by the World Conservation Union (WCU), this price seems a little low. The list of other mammals includes ibex and chamois at 7,000 liras, roe deer, gazelles and lynx at 5,000 liras, water sables, wild cats and caracals at 4,000 liras, and finally the bargain basement of the mammalian world, wolves and spotted martens at only 850 liras.

Among the avian species, crested pelicans, collared bustards, bald ibis, flamingos, cranes and storks are all covered at between 2,000 and 3,000 liras, but the highest penalties, 6,000 liras, go to those who illegally prey on hawks and falcons.

Birds of prey are threatened not only by illegal hunting but by smuggling. Interpol identified more than 44 international bird smugglers (mainly German and Austrian) working in Turkey in 1998. It also estimated that more than 100,000 birds in 30 years had been taken illicitly over the border to Syria from neighboring Turkish provinces and that 500,000 eggs had been moved by stealth into western Europe. The birds are very valuable commodities, commanding prices up to 100,000 euros (about $136,000) in the West and as much as $200,000 from Arabian sheikhs if they have been trained to hunt bustards and desert foxes.

In previous years, hunting fines were much lower and not at all rigorously implemented, and the ban on hunting certain animals and large fines associated with illegal hunting have been met with cynicism by Turkey's hunting fraternity. Hunters accuse the government of economic opportunism, claiming that bans have been instituted so that a tourism industry based on hunting can be established. They complain that local people have lost the right to protect themselves against the depredation of wild boars, lynx, wolves and other large fauna but that rich foreigners can pay to prey.

Certainly the government has licensed a limited number of what it considers A-class tourism agencies to carry out these types of tours, and these companies can apply for permits for foreigners to be taken out on accompanied hunts. However, the animals that foreigners can hunt are strictly limited, and the big Turkish four are the bear, chamois, ibex and wild boar. No other animals can be hunted in government forests, though they can be on private reserves (of which there are very few).

Hunting tours are by no means cheap. A five-day ibex hunt will set you back 4,490 euros or about 8,000 liras, and each hunter is only entitled to one ibex, although you are entitled to a 2,000-euro refund if there is no bag. Conversely, if you shoot an ibex with horns longer than 100 centimeters, you are charged an extra 60 euros per centimeter of horn. Chamois hunting will cost 3,950 euros or 7,000 liras for the same length of time and buy you rights to a single corpse, but wild-boar drive-hunting is a mere snip at 1,590 euros, and you can kill as many pigs as you like. No figures were available for bear hunts, but as the costs for ibex and chamois are somewhat similar to the hunting-fine levels, it may be safe to assume a fee of about 18,000 liras or 10,000 euros.

If accounts of hunting in the past are to be believed, the current single-animal quotas are a good idea. Otherwise, trigger-happy modern-day equivalents of William Gill, an explorer and former spy of the British War Office, would be laying waste to the Turkish countryside. Gill wrote the following in his journal about a day's hunting while working at the Boundary Commission in Istanbul in 1879:

Over the very ground on which we were shooting, a man named Cooper shot nearly 400 quail in one day, and his party (of 47, I think) shot upwards of 2,000 quail in three days. It shows what luck there is. Near here also, but in not such a good place, an Austrian, Wurmbrandt, shot 105 before 9am.

Although skeptics believe the hunting bans are for the purpose of creating a hunting industry, objective reports by TRAFFIC (Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce) Europe, the wildlife trade monitoring program of the World Wide Fund for Nature and the WCU, conclude that such schemes actually bring little advantage to local economies. Although European hunters spend millions of euros on supplies and travel, only a third of those funds end up in the countries whose wildlife attracts the hunters.

Doris Hofer, author of the 2002 TRAFFIC Europe report "The Lion's Share of the Hunt - Trophy Hunting and Conservation", also concluded that tourism hunting had little practical effect on conservation: "Insufficient documentation reduces trophy hunting's potential benefits for conservation and to regional sustainable development. Without a clear understanding, motivation for law-enforcement staff and incentives for enhancement of wildlife-management systems remains limited."

While any measures to protect endangered species are welcome, it remains an irony that perhaps the biggest boon to rare wildlife was last year's bird-flu scare, which not only resulted in a total ban on shooting wild birds but also consequently kept many hunters, both Turkish and foreign, out of the woods and marshes.

Fazile Zahir is of Turkish descent, born and brought up in London. She moved to Turkey in 2005 and has been writing full-time since then.

(Copyright 2007 Fazile Zahir.)