Rational Hunting Management – The Impact on Plant Production and Annual Culling of Wild Game Animals

The article reviews the field of hunting wild animals at the turn of the century, and the recent necessity to do so, mainly due to the increasing damage to agricultural and forest crops caused by ungulates. The existence of wild animals is inextricably linked to access to particular natural environments. In these areas, animals live and perform basic life functions, one of the most important of which is daily feeding. The current population management model provides for annual culling in accordance with the principles set out in the hunting management guidelines, i.e. obtaining a certain group of animals, considering population structures, so as to ensure the sustainability of the population. At the same time, these guidelines indicate that population management should eliminate or minimize the damage caused by animals, mainly to agricultural crops. A simulation of a 5-year suspension of hunters’ activity in the field of hunting management, especially the shooting of large game animals, clearly shows what the consequences would be in terms of the dynamics of the numbers of individual species. In this short period of time, the number of deer and wild boars would increase quite significantly: estimates indicate that the number of deer would increase several times, while that of wild boars would grow by as much as 30 times. With such high densities of ungulates, due to their pressure on their habitats, it would be impossible to conduct rational agricultural management, and in some situations forest management as well. Such solutions would result in very high amounts of compensation having to be paid to the injured parties by the legal owner of the game animals, i.e. the State Treasury. Therefore, these burdens would actually be borne by society as a whole. However, examples from 2016–2018 showed that the State as an institution is completely unprepared for this, both substantively and financially.