Management plans for Pu’u Maka’ala prepared a decade ago called for controlling pigs through a combination of hunt–ing (including staff hunting) and snaring.
Since then, public hunting has occurred, but the first snare has yet to be set. Still, snaring may be the only way to get the pig population low enough to keep Pu’u Maka’ala and other areas of high natural value from succumbing altogether to alien infestations.
Bill Stormont of the Natural Area Reserves System on the Big Island says hunters have reported dwindling numbers of pigs bagged in Pu’u Maka’ala. According to wildlife managers, the fewer the pigs in an area, the harder it gets to hunt down the last ones.
“They’re just too hard to find,” says Jack Jeffrey, staff biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge on the Big Island. And if hunters can’t take the last ones, the pigs breed themselves back into the pink.
As an example, Jeffrey cites an area of the Hakalau refuge where staff hunting eventually got the pig population down to a fraction of its former level. Plant communities rebounded, but once hunting stopped, those new plants helped fuel a pig “population explosion.”
Nothing works against pigs as well as snaring, Jeffrey says. In one unit of Hakalau, snares reduced the pig population by 90 percent (120 pigs) over 18 months. In another unit of similar size, says Jeffrey, it took nine years of hunting with dogs to get a 90 percent reduction, and more than 1,000 pigs were killed “because we were catching up behind reproduction.”
Although animal rights activists denounce snaring as cruel and hunters hate the practice for its waste of meat, Jeffrey defends snaring as a method that produces “less pain and suffering units.” In other words, because snaring is more efficient than hunting, the number of animals that must be killed over time in order to clear an area is much smaller than it is with hunting.
Besides being more effective, snaring is cheaper than staff hunting with dogs.
While NARS managers have been reluctant to use snares, managers of other protected areas in Hawai’i have employed snares freely when hunting is not able to get pig numbers down.
“We’ve been doing snaring from day one, says Randy Bartlett, supervisor for Maui Land & Pineapple Company’s Pu’u Kukui watershed preserve in the West Maui mountains. Bartlett’s crew fenced and snared the reserve’s higher elevation units (public hunting continues on the lower unfenced units). In about four years they were pig-free, he says, and they’ve remained that way for about five years.
Mark White, director of the Nature Conservancy of Hawai’i’s 5,230-acre Waikamoi preserve on Maui, says snares played an important role in the control of pigs there, too. After snares removed most pigs, fencing and limited public hunting were used to protect the land with the best natural flora and fauna.
While the practice of snaring remains controversial, among natural resource managers it has near-universal support. This was illustrated in a letter that the East Maui Watershed Partnership sent August 27, 1999 to state legislators and members of the Maui County Council. The partnership includes The Nature Conservancy, East Maui Irrigation Co., the National Park Service, and the state Department of Land and Natural Resources. The purpose of the letter was to explain the benefits of snaring in protecting watershed values and other natural resources.
“Snaring, used in combination with fences, is by far the best method in the long run from standpoints of both ecosystem protection and minimizing animal suffering,” the letter states.
NARS 1997 management policy states that in reserves, “strategies to reduce populations of non-native animals to the lowest possible level will be employed.” It adds: “Sustained yield management of animals for hunting is contrary to the intent of the NARS.” Among the control methods listed in the management plan are “fencing, trapping, snaring, and aerial shooting” if public hunting does not afford adequate control of ungulates.
Resource managers agree that public hunting will not keep ungulate populations low enough to protect native forests and rare native species. Still, this remains the “#1 choice” for controlling ungulates, according to NARS report to the 1999 Legislature.
Augmenting public hunting are staff hunts, outplanting of rare plant species, and fencing. The total fencing for NARS’s 110,000 acres of reserves amounts to about 40 miles, according to program manager Randy Kennedy. Snaring is not one of the control methods listed in the NARS report to the legislature.
Why?
“It’s politically too sensitive,” Stormont admits.
— Christopher Joyce
Volume 10, Number 5 November 1999
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