So, Mark Twain wrote,
Any government could have told her that the best way to increase wolves in America,
rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India is to pay a bounty on their scalps.
Then every patriot goes to raising them.
Welcome to Wild Turkey Science,
a podcast made possible by Turkeys for Tomorrow.
I'm Dr. Marcus Lashley, Professor of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Florida.
And I'm Dr. Will Goolsby, Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Management at Auburn University.
We're both lifelong hunters and devoted scientists who are passionate about hunting,
managing, and researching wild turkeys.
In this podcast, we'll explore turkey research, speak to the experts in the field,
and address the difficult questions related to wild turkey ecology and management.
Our goal is to serve as your connection to wild turkey science.
It does kind of look like you're up to something nefarious.
Well, I'm on the edge of my seat about this one.
I hope you brought a ladle.
A ladle?
Yeah, because we're gonna stir the pot.
Well, I was thinking we're gonna lap it up.
I'm about to lap it up.
Let me ask you a question, Will.
I think you are going to lap up some of this info.
I mean, it's cool stuff.
Oh, I'm going to like it, I know.
But why do I feel like it's going to be a hot take?
To be clear to everybody out there, we are doing a deep dive on a topic that comes up a lot.
How many times, Will, have you heard or been told?
How many times have you heard or been told or gotten comments?
I know we do on our episodes sometimes.
We hear about it a lot that to solve our turkey woes, we need to have a predator bounty.
So many times.
I mean, it's like common knowledge.
It's like almost every single one of our YouTube episodes has that comment on it somewhere.
But you have now done a deep dive on that topic.
I have.
From what I understand.
And to be clear to everybody out there, I did not do a deep dive on the topic.
And I don't know what you found or what you're going to talk about other than that topic.
Well, it's going to be fun because I'm the one armed with the information today.
And I can quiz you on this stuff.
Like you have been with me on a couple of recent episodes.
Hey, you've done that to me before.
I know I have.
So see the jokes on you though, because I don't care if it makes me sound dumb.
I mean, did you think I do based on our history on this show?
No, obviously we just let it ride.
Yeah.
So you're going to get my genuine response and my genuine not lack of knowledge whenever it emerges.
Okay.
Well, you ready to go?
Yeah, but I do feel like it's going to be kind of a hot take just because of the way
you had presented yourself when we came to the episode.
How was that?
You're just like sitting all over there with your arms crossed.
Like I'm about to tell y'all something.
Well, I think.
I think that, uh, well, maybe I do feel that way.
Maybe I shouldn't be that.
Maybe I shouldn't be so eager to ruin, ruin people's thoughts or perceptions of the way
things work, but I don't know.
Maybe that's one of the aspects that I enjoy about science and why I enjoy being a scientist
is because that's part of our job is to figure out if things really work like we think they
would logically.
And sometimes it's fun when they don't, to be honest, it's kind of more interesting.
I mean, it's frustrating, but interesting.
Well, you know, it's a fundamental aspect of our work and, you know, it's, it's disappointing
sometimes when scientists don't react to things the way that I'm about to lay out.
But I commonly go into things with a hypothesis and I have a prediction that I think, okay,
this is the way this is going to happen.
And I collect data and that doesn't work like that.
And it's like, dang.
Yeah, well, that's interesting.
I mean, just like probably happens more often than not.
Right.
Yeah.
All the time.
But it hooks me in and now I'm like, all right, why didn't it work that way?
We got to figure out and not, we got to do something different to figure out how to make
sure that we know it works this way.
Like, that's not, you know, we don't want that kind of, of approach and, uh, you know,
this sounds like might be one of those topics where we think it works away and then it doesn't.
And then I'm going to be really intrigued by that if that's the case.
Yeah.
Okay.
You ready?
Well, yeah.
Do you have a place that you want to start?
I do.
Well, let's start there.
With a glossary term.
A glossary term.
Yeah.
Have you ever heard of the term of a perverse incentive?
Perverse.
I don't think I've heard that terminology, but I might be able to work out the definition
based on the terms.
A perverse incentive is an incentive structure with undesirable results.
Particularly one.
It's interesting that you would start there.
A particularly one where those effects are unexpected and contrary to the intentions
of its designers.
I think that falls perfectly within what we've just been talking about.
Yeah.
And it is a pretty apt description of what happens a lot of times with these predator
bounty programs.
And so I'm going to kind of the way that I did this and have it planned out, I'm going
to start out with a couple of kind of classic examples of how this plays out that may not
be really directly related to turkeys.
And then we'll get into some literature that is more so directly related to the topic.
I think that's good.
But to start with, since you started this out with a Webster's Dictionary entry, what
is a predator bounty program just in general?
How would you describe that?
In some way of incentivizing, typically monetarily, the harvesting of a particular species of
animal in a particular area.
With the intention of...
Reducing the population of that animal.
Yeah.
But for some purpose, right?
For some purpose.
And it's not always...
Like if it was for turkeys, we might remove coyotes to increase hen survival.
Yes.
Or whatever.
Yes.
Something like that.
And as it turns out, I have some information on coyote bounties too.
Oh.
So that'll be directly relevant to that.
Cool.
Okay.
So have you ever heard of the cobra effect?
That's where I'm going to start out today.
The cobra?
The cobra effect.
The only cobra I know is Cobra Kai, baby.
Okay.
Strike first, strike hard.
Isn't that what the saying is?
I was, man, when I was about eight years old, I was swinging nunchucks, you know, like the
plastic ones trying to be Karate Kid.
Well, you know, they remade a show centered around the Cobra Kai gym a few years ago.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
I watched it.
Okay, good.
It's weird saying Karate Kid as an adult.
Oh, I know.
He's not as intimidating as I remember him being when I was a kid.
So I am aware of the cobra.
When I watched Karate Kid as a kid, I thought he was a badass.
And it's like, now that I've grown up and I watch him, I'm like, I don't know if he
sells the part that well.
Yeah.
All right.
The cobra effect.
So backstory here.
This was in the-
I'm sorry, I haven't recovered yet.
I have heard of the cobra.
We'll keep working on your recovery over there.
So the British government, it was occupying India, right.
And they were concerned about the number of venomous cobras.
Shit, we're going way back.
I am.
So they were concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi.
So what'd they do?
Put a bounty on them.
They put a bounty on them.
So initially, the bounty program seemed to be pretty successful.
People were bringing in huge numbers of snakes all the time, trying to get reward.
But then what happens?
Somebody starts breeding snakes and they start trying to game the system.
Yeah.
So the program, I don't know if we want to talk about this or not.
Just tell me if you do or don't.
But this makes me think of like giving up density.
You know what I'm saying?
Like with, with regards to wildlife that, you know, if they're trying to acquire a food
resource or something like that, there's a certain point past which there's too few of
that food item within an area for it to be worthwhile for them to search for it.
And I think, and that, and that is kind of an overarching principle that I think we'll
touch on several times today is if you're implementing a program that people are
getting financially rewarded for, that is intended to control or eradicate individuals
of a certain species, you eventually get to this point of diminishing returns where you're
putting in a whole lot of effort for very few animals that are captured.
And if the money is being paid off of how many animals you capture, you're probably
either going to one, quit when you get to that density and give up like we were just
talking about, or two, you're going to move to another area that has more of that animal.
And then you take the pressure off of the area where the population has been reduced
and it starts to respond positively again.
MIKE Yeah.
And then we could go a little further than that.
Another thing that could happen is it becomes part of the, the culture or livelihood.
And then you start to cultivate that for, to, to ensure that the sustainability of that
opportunity.
And that is, that is exactly what happened in India.
People began to breed the cobras for income.
And the program eventually got scrapped once, uh, the British government caught on to it.
And you know what, and you know what, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
You know what happened to, to all these breeding populations that people had curated?
They just released them.
They released them.
And the cobra population ended up higher than it was before the bounty program was implemented.
So first important point that I want to make here today is that human psychology
plays a huge role in the effectiveness of these programs.
And that's just one example.
MIKE That's not what would happen with turkeys.
MIKE Okay.
All right.
I got another one for you.
I got another one for you on our little historical adventure.
MIKE Is it another cobra example?
MIKE No, this one is the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 in Vietnam.
You ever heard about that one?
MIKE The Great Rat Massacre?
MIKE The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre.
MIKE I don't know what that word is.
MIKE No one knew that they were going to be hearing about the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre today.
MIKE What is Hanoi?
Can you say that, like spell that word?
MIKE It's in Vietnam.
MIKE It's just a place?
MIKE Yes.
MIKE Okay.
MIKE It's a place in Vietnam.
MIKE I don't know.
I'm not, not familiar with that geography.
MIKE So this was in the early 1900s.
Vietnam was under French colonial rule and the government created a bounty that paid
one cent for each rat killed.
And so to prove that they had killed a rat, they brought the tail back to somebody.
They killed the rat, they severed the tail, brought it back and they got paid for it.
So it wasn't too long that officials started noticing rats that were running around Hanoi
that were missing what?
MIKE A foot.
MIKE No, their tail.
God, you're being difficult today for the sake of difficulty.
Yes, they were, they were catching them in live traps, cutting off their tails and releasing
them so that they would keep breeding to make more young rats with tails that they could
cut off.
MIKE Well, where does the massacre come in?
MIKE Well, they were trying to make it into a rat massacre, but it ended up just being
a massive tail docking event, I guess.
MIKE So the, all right, my last little, wait, wait, wait, wait.
MIKE Oh, okay.
MIKE I'm not past it yet.
MIKE All right.
MIKE So the bounty on rats.
MIKE Yeah, a penny a rat.
MIKE A penny a rat resulted in all the rats getting their tail cut off.
So now there's a bunch of rats running around with no tails that are still breeding.
MIKE They're still breeding.
MIKE And now that is amazing.
MIKE I mean, never, what is the, what is the term about?
I don't know.
It's just like never underestimate people's ability to work smarter, not harder, I guess.
They'll find a work, people will find a workaround for anything.
MIKE I'm just, I was trying to think through the, is there, I guess that could happen with
raccoons, you know, with ratcheting tails, but it really matters how you measure, you know,
the, uh, the bounty.
MIKE Well, so I can tell you giving more modern examples, the same thing, I don't know about
leaving them alive, but there's a lot of issues with bounty programs typically require you to
bring some part of the animal back to prove, to prove that you killed it.
And I know that people have taken advantage of those programs that were designed for feral pig
control, where they had to bring back pig tails.
I know they've done that with beaver tails.
I have a personal experience with that.
Um, and then I know.
MIKE Where you just cut the tail off a beaver and then let it go.
MIKE Uh-huh.
MIKE You just cut the tail off.
MIKE No, no, no.
They were still, in this, in that instance, people were still killing them, but they were
killing them outside of the area that they were supposed to be getting paid for the bounty and
bringing them, bringing the tail back to the other area.
Um, and then I know of an example where that was done on preparing for this episode
with actually seals.
So there's a bounty on seals, um, that I found some information about we might get into today.
MIKE Interesting.
All right.
Well, I'll let you move on.
MIKE Okay.
MIKE I just.
MIKE Well, my last little bit of, my last little historical reference, um, I actually
pulled from Mark Twain's autobiography, um, and his wife decided to pay their son to control
flies at their house.
And of course, you know, what does the son see?
He's like, man, I'm going to make some money.
Absolutely.
And, uh, his, so Mark Twain wrote, any government could have told her that the best way to
increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia and snakes in India is to pay a bounty on
their scalps.
Then every Patriot goes to raising them.
And I, I mean, I don't think we would probably, you know, I don't think people would be trying
to raise animals like that to take advantage of a bounty program today, the way they would
have historically when people were more in a subsistence state of living.
But it's, I think the point still stands.
And anyways, it was interesting to me that Mark Twain had a quote on this.
So I had to include it.
That's a really interesting quote.
And I'm just thinking like, you're going to have some hate messages on YouTube.
Oh, I know.
We've got so many people telling us about that.
But before y'all, before y'all send me that hate message, before y'all send me that hate
message, think about this.
Okay.
They've already said it, man.
No, no, no, no.
They said it three minutes ago.
I might get them on that backspace button right here.
We'll see.
We make this same argument about game species.
When you place a value on an animal, people are incentivized to conserve it.
And so, but it's the opposite situation.
So in the bounty system, they're incentivized to conserve it to make money.
In the hunting situation, like when we recovered wild turkeys, for example, the only reason
we recovered wild turkeys is because they had value as a game species, right?
So animals that have value, people find a way to keep those animals around in general.
Yeah.
So we make the same argument when it comes to the positive aspects of wildlife conservation.
I heard this argument the other day.
I think this is 100% accurate, but I have not vetted it myself.
But this is what was said, that there have been no game species under protections as
a game species that have gone extinct.
Yep.
It's pretty incredible.
Yeah.
Especially when there are many, many, many, many, many, many species that have gone extinct.
But I think that the point here is that some of those same forces that are in effect on
this bounty system that perhaps make it less effective than we think it'd be, I do actually
have an example that we can pull from the literature of one that was somewhat successful
that we'll get to at the end, because it really is kind of the exception, not the norm.
I think it, I'm glad we are going to cover that, but I think your point
is a very interesting one and well-taken.
When we think about it from the game species, it's a positive viewpoint, and everybody,
I mean, that's pretty ubiquitously accepted.
Right?
As if we put a value on a species, it will get conserved.
It's one of our main talking points about game management and conservation.
But when it's a species that we view as negative, like a predator
or an invasive species or whatever, that logic breaks down.
Yep.
It's interesting.
But the fundamental way that it operates does not.
Yeah, that's right.
The next thing that I want to get into is about the pig bounty example.
I'm pretty familiar with this one.
This was from a paper that was written by one of my colleagues, Steve Ditchcoff,
who's also here at Auburn.
They looked at a pig bounty program that was implemented on Fort Benning in Georgia, which
for those of you that don't know, that's directly east of me here in Auburn, so right across the
line in kind of west central Georgia, and I think it's the home for all of the US Army's
infantry training.
So they have tons of wildlands across the property.
They've got a lot of pines and prescribed fire and everything like that.
And it's known for having a relatively high pig population.
And so they tried to implement a bounty there.
And we'll talk about the results of that program.
But before I go into that, there were a couple of additional little points that I gleaned
from the introduction of that article that I wanted to share.
And so we've already talked about, they phrased them in this paper as the bad intentions of
participants.
I would phrase it more so as the misaligned objectives of the bounty program versus the
people participating in the bounty program.
Their objectives are not congruent with each other, right?
So we talked about that.
But then also in the Ditchcoff et al paper, they point out that bounty failure is also
often attributed to the biology of the species being poorly understood or incorporated into
the program.
So that it's not considering the biological attributes of that species and how a control
effort should be shaped or prescribed in reference to that.
Does that make sense?
So they pointed that out.
And then we'll just get right into the story of the Pig Bounty Program.
So the Army decided when they implemented this, this was back in 2007 and 2008, and
they instituted a bounty program that paid out $40 for every feral pigtail that was brought
back.
So during the study, which again, it was only, it wasn't even two full years.
It was most of 2007 and a part of 2008, I believe.
And over the course of that time period, they removed about 1,100 pigs from the site.
Okay.
So 1,138 pigs.
And the total cost of removal of those was $57,000, almost $300.
Okay.
So you know what I meant to calculate the cost per pig?
How many sacks of corn is that?
Oh, we're getting there too.
Trust me.
That's, I'm so glad you brought that up because that's a part of this conversation.
Oh man.
Well, that's a cost of about $50 per pig, not horrible.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, if it worked, it isn't.
Well, here's the problem.
You want to guess what the removal rate was?
The density of removal?
So 1,100 pigs on Fort Benning?
Yeah.
I don't know how big is Fort Benning.
Well, I mean, then I'd just be giving you the numbers to make the calculation.
One per 150 acres.
No, they would have probably had very different results if that was the case.
The removal rate was less than one pig per square mile and a third, 1.3 square miles.
And the reason they use that weird number is because that was the average
home range size of a sounder, was 1.3 square miles.
And they removed-
Like 800 acres or something?
1.3 times 640.
Or 900, something like that.
832.
So less than one pig for every 832 acres.
I mean, anybody that has ever dealt with pigs knows that that's not going to get it.
So that removal program, that was the agency removal,
or that's how many got incentivized to be removed?
That's how many got incentivized.
Well, interestingly, they were not able, because they had been documenting,
you know, everything that gets killed off that base gets recorded.
And the removal rate pre-bounty program was similar to the removal rate post-bounty program.
It did not change the removal rate.
Okay.
So Fort Benning was removing pigs and then they implemented a bounty program to help,
and they still kept the same rate of removing pigs.
Exactly.
So it doesn't work.
And here's part of the problem.
Some reports were that people were buying tails from game processors or killing them elsewhere,
and then reselling them to the army at a higher price.
So, you know, you could maybe go to a meat processor-
Capitalism.
Capitalism always wins, man.
I mean, they were going down to, you know, Bob's Deer Processing
and buying a pig tail for $20 and selling it to the army for $40.
And then the processor makes a bunch of money off a pig tail.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Are you ready for this?
Yeah.
Are you still on pigs?
Yes.
Okay.
Well, let's don't leave there because I want to talk about a different aspect of this,
but go ahead.
What do you think happened to the pig density?
It increased.
I'm just guessing.
It did actually increase.
I'm guessing.
Even worse than not changing, it increased.
Yeah.
Do you want to guess why?
People brought pigs in.
No.
It's back to something you said a second ago.
They cut all the tails off and released them.
I don't know.
Quit linking me hanging.
See, this is why I like being the one armed with the information.
They dispersed 40 tons of corn and 30 tons of slop throughout the installation over a
six month period.
And they think that, I mean, this is a quote from the article, litter size and offspring
survival increased under the bounty scheme due to the bait used to attract animals to
hunting and trapping sites.
The productivity rate we observed was similar to that of adult female pigs in a population
provided with supplemental feed.
Sounder size increased 144 to 233 percent and the number of piglets per female increased
by 191 to 219 percent.
That didn't work.
That's something right there.
And that was from giving them a bunch of corn and slop.
Yeah.
Total 70 tons of feed over a six month period.
That 70 tons.
How much is that per square mile in that area?
I can't, I realized I was trying to back construct that.
Well, that's 140,000 pounds.
Of corn and slop?
Yeah, I think it's combined.
I combined it all.
Let's see, Fort Benning is 197,000 acres.
So it was pretty spread out.
Yeah, it was only like a, what did you say, 120,000?
140,000 pounds.
Yeah.
So less than a pound per acre.
But you would presume that it was probably concentrated in certain areas of the property.
It's not going to be evenly distributed across the-
They didn't walk through there with a spinner.
Yeah, right.
Just distributing it equally.
One thing I will mention too is they noted that a problem was that the hunters generally
were targeting the large boars and they weren't really killing females and juveniles.
So all that to say, especially when you consider the before versus after harvest rate, it doesn't
really seem like the bounty program actually incentivized people to change their behavior
that much in such a way that it would actually lead to a reduction in the population.
Mm-hmm.
And that's not the only example of that that I have.
I've got another one from another paper.
Well, another thing that's really interesting, and I did not prepare for this, so I can't
remember where this is cited, and maybe you will, or maybe they cited it even in this
paper, but it's interesting to me that from the 1500s all the way up until the early 1980s,
pigs were in what, five states?
Oh yeah, mm-hmm.
And then from 1980 to the early 2000s, they went from five, I think, to 45, I'm pretty
sure.
Yeah.
Like the range expansion over that, I mean, it's just a fraction of the time that there
have been pigs in the United States.
Yeah, I mean, I can remember being a little kid, like late 80s, early 90s, and my dad
had a good buddy that was big into pig hunting down there in South Alabama, and he would
have to go way back in the Delta, he'd be crawling back through there trying to find
pigs when he'd go hunt and have to access it by boat and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
It's like now people are just tired of killing them.
Yeah.
Well, my point is that it became valuable as a thing to hunt.
We also started incentivizing people through these kinds of programs and stuff.
And what it did was facilitate moving pigs to new areas and releasing pigs in places
that they start to cause a problem to incentivize it and all this kind of, I mean, it just,
like the pigs are, I think are a really good example.
I'm glad you brought that up because some of the states have banned pig hunting.
I was going to come to that.
For that very reason, because just like we talked about earlier, if you incentivize having
them around, you make, whether that's financially or recreationally, people try to propagate
them.
Yeah.
But exactly what you just said was where I was going to go as a couple of states took
a radical approach.
And it seems very counterintuitive.
Yeah, it seems counterintuitive.
And that's my point here.
And the reason that people keep saying this, it is intuitive that this actually would address
a problem.
That makes sense, just intuitively.
Right.
But it just doesn't work out that way because of the way that it plays out.
I mean, we've got examples all the way back to whenever that was in India.
Yeah.
And did you say you found an example where it worked?
Yes.
So at least we've got one.
Yeah.
And I'm curious to hear about that because I don't know what it is right off.
But the best examples with pigs are the couple of instances where the value of it was taken
away.
Right.
So this is an interesting intersection between wildlife biology and human psychology and
economics.
And human behavior plays a much larger role in this than wildlife biology does.
Yeah.
Which kind of makes it hard to talk about.
Very interesting.
Yeah.
I'm really, really curious to see what the comments on this episode are going to be.
That's the only reason you had me lead it.
You wanted it all directed at me.
No.
I mean, it's going to be on my YouTube channel.
All right, you ready to move to coyotes?
I think so.
Okay.
All right.
So I got a paper from Bartell and Brunson, 2003.
It was in Utah.
So Utah reinstated, so I guess they had one previously that they had canceled and they
reinstated it, a coyote bounty program in 2000.
And so the goal of this paper is mostly survey work and they wanted to assess the effects
of the bounty program on coyote take and hunter participation.
So the first thing that they looked at that I included in my notes here is the number
of people that had not been killing coyotes previously that started to because of the
bounty program.
So of the people that they sent surveys to, what percentage of them would you guess started
harvesting coyotes because the bounty program was introduced?
So if you've got a hundred guys that are participating in this bounty program, what
number do you think just started killing coyotes because of the program?
Half of them.
8%.
8%?
Yeah.
Eight out of a hundred.
So the rest of them were already killing coyotes.
So over 90% of participants had reported harvesting coyotes within the previous few
years.
They also reported that they had been taking coyotes out of the wild.
They also reported that they had been taking red fox, skunks, bobcats, and badgers in the
previous year.
So generally speaking, these were probably people that were already trapping and probably
for harvesting.
So in addition to that.
They're just diversifying their portfolio.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a new income stream, right?
Yeah.
Which I'm not knocking them for that.
No.
I'm just saying that's why it doesn't work.
Absolutely.
Also noted participants did not change how they harvested coyotes.
So 82% of those involved in the program were still just calling and shooting.
So they didn't change into trapping or running like a long line of a long line trap line
when the bounty program was implemented.
And this part is the most telling to me and was also the most interesting to me.
They reported that because they wanted to look at the motivations of why they participated
and understand that.
And one would think, you know, we keep talking about how logical some of this is.
One would think that they're mostly doing it to be incentivized because of the bounty
reward, the money.
But in fact, what they reported is that enjoying the outdoors, big game protection, and ensuring
hunting rights were the most important motives for their participation.
The next four motives, which were recreation, testing outdoor skills, livestock protection,
and participation in conservation were all equal in importance.
But gaining additional income was identified as the least important factor in participating
in that program.
I don't even know how to digest that.
What I'm taking away from it is that.
So basically, let me see if I understand that only 8% of the people started into the bounty
program because there was a bounty program.
The rest of them just were trapping because they do that.
Yeah.
For whatever reason.
They were trapping or calling and shooting because they already do that.
So then when you ask them all why they're participating, 92 out of 100 of them are responding
for why they are participating in trapping because they aren't actually, they weren't
incentivized to start by the program.
No.
So let me back up and we may have speculated too much and gotten off on the wrong track.
82% of people were harvesting coyotes by calling and shooting.
So it wasn't like there were many trappers in this.
Even though people reported taking fox, skunks, bobcats, and badgers.
I guess they were taking them while they were out there calling and shooting.
I'm not sure.
It didn't specify in the article.
Oh, well, yeah, I see.
I said trapping, but I meant taking predators.
Okay.
I've just kind of condensed that down to the one word, but I meant they're participating
in predator removal somehow or another.
Yeah.
And I think basically the take-home story is these people are doing what, it's the same
people doing it as we're doing it previously.
They're doing it the same way that they were doing it previously.
They're doing it for the same reasons that they always were.
And probably the only reason they're participating in the bounty program is they were going to
do it anyway.
Why not get paid for it?
Yeah.
Well, clearly it wasn't incentivized, not even in the top many reasons that they do it.
Right.
But you could say.
They're not ranking the incentive, even in the top many reasons that they're doing it
to begin with.
Well, and to play devil's advocate here, maybe the reward wasn't high enough.
Maybe so.
You know, that would be a factor, but then the problem.
But if you go through all the other examples.
Well, that's the problem is if you incentivize it too much, then you create dishonesty in
the system.
Yeah.
All right.
Let me get into the biology of this too.
There was a little bit of that.
That's a good point.
If you had gotten it into a, if you had moved it up enough to where it actually was one
of the top ranking, then it's a financial decision.
Not that they're not doing it for the sake of the other objectives associated with the
program.
And that's when you're going to start having people cheat the system.
Yeah.
All right.
So a little bit, one last little fact before we leave this, the highest rate of county
level removal, they put a table in there and they had all these counties that the program
was implemented in and the total removal.
So they removed 332 coyotes over a nine month period.
And that was done by 126 individuals.
So 126 people removed 332 coyotes over a nine month period in Beaver County, Utah, which
is, I calculated 2,592 square miles.
So that comes out to a coyote harvest of 0.13 coyotes per square mile.
Not enough to move the needle.
No.
Even if it, let's say a quarter of that's actually somewhere that could be occupied
by a coyote, it's still not.
Yeah.
And my study was not designed to do this, but we did estimate coyote density as part
of my PhD research.
And I know that John Kilgo and I shared some numbers back and forth several years ago,
cause we were kind of trying to come up with a general idea of, you know, like what is
probably a region wide average that coyotes occur at.
And I think where we were ending up was somewhere around like four to six coyotes per square
mile on average.
And they were removing in this particular study, you know, basically a 10th of a coyote
per square mile.
I think we probably have higher densities here than they do, just to be clear.
Yeah.
Well, the other thing is the compensatory immigration, compensatory reproduction.
We haven't even gotten into all that.
Yeah.
Well, I don't feel very good about predator Mounties right now.
So do you have, are we ready to move on to where, when it worked?
Yeah, almost, uh, we were almost there.
I've got one more stop before we get there.
Cause this one was kind of just an interesting one.
And I really thought.
Lay it on me.
I really thought that it spoke to the human psychology of this whole issue.
I mean, it like it hit it right on the nose.
Okay.
So I'll give you a little bit of background.
There's not a lot of results in this.
I kind of want to just get to how people felt about it.
But, um, this paper was by, uh, Lely et al 2009.
I'm probably not saying that right.
Apologies.
Um, but there, they recorded, or they, um, they did some work on a historical seal bounty
program that had been implemented in the late 1800s, early 1900s in the states of Maine and
Massachusetts.
And during the part of, uh, during the course of that, they estimated that 72 to 135,000
seals were killed as part of the program.
And they said that it probably had a substantial impact, particularly around areas that had high
population, high human population densities.
Um, and what was really interesting though, like, like I was talking about earlier, getting
to the human psychology side of this equation, it said they were likely successful at reducing
conflict between seals and fishermen.
However, cause that was the main, you know, reason that they wanted to control them.
However, it is also true that fishermen never ceased complaining about the impact of seals
on fish, no matter how low the seal population fell.
Eventually the bounties were repealed because the costs were felt, uh, to outweigh the benefits
and people still weren't satisfied.
So even causing the species to basically go extinct.
Yeah.
Well, and seals are not even close to being a seal biologist, but the little bit, relative
to the average person, you're pretty damn close.
The little bit that I know about them is, it tells me that they have a much lower reproductive
rate than, you know, coyotes or coons, or a lot of these turkey predators that we're
dealing with.
So they're probably a lot easier to control.
And then, you know, they have this convenient habit of swimming up around fishing boats
and hanging out around docks and marinas and makes them easy to kill.
Yeah.
Those habits.
Yeah.
All right.
So you're ready to get to where it worked or you want to.
Hold on.
Okay.
I've been thinking through this while you're laying all this, this on me.
I'm dropping the note.
And I'm, I'm also thinking about how people are going to react to it.
Cause this one's got the potential to, to circulate we'll say.
Yeah.
And if you're listening out there, share it with everybody.
Let's get it.
Let's get Will in front of as many people as we can.
But I did think about the incentivize, like the, like what the incentive is.
So when you have a general incentive like this, where the whole population doesn't have
a vested interest in outcome, they just have a vested incentive.
Yeah.
I don't know if that's the right way to say that, but everyone gets equal incentive,
but they don't all get equal, uh, investment in the outcome.
That's very different than having a landowner that wants more turkeys who has a vested interest
in making sure that, you know, the predator population has been suppressed so that they
get more turkeys, the different kind of incentive.
And that one, I would say is much more likely to work.
Well, it's an entirely different scale too.
Yeah, I know.
But I'm just saying when everyone has a vested interest in the outcome,
then the incentive is now the vested interest in the outcome rather than a financial incentive.
Right.
So anyway, I don't know where you're going with that other one,
but I was thinking through that, like, it's not that, I mean, we're, we're actively
both involved in research to try to understand how predator removal can impact turkeys.
Right.
That's very different than just having a blanket incentive for everybody to kill predators.
Yeah, we're not speaking at all to the efficacy of predator control right now.
We are speaking to the efficacy of bounty programs to achieve predator control.
That's right.
Is this a good way to go about it or not?
Right. And we're not talking about whether or not predator removal is a feasible strategy.
We've done that elsewhere and we can link those episodes.
Oh yeah.
Also, in terms of an incentive structure, one that tries to have a local buy-in to an outcome
is much more likely to work than one that has a incentive to try to achieve that outcome without
a vested interest in the outcome being achieved.
Yeah. Aren't we already there with turkeys? I mean, don't we, don't you think that
turkey hunters have a shared incentive to reduce predator populations to benefit turkeys?
I do on their property, but I don't think so.
You don't think they're concerned about it at a larger scale?
No.
Yeah.
Yeah. So people aren't going out and trapping, obviously, property that's not theirs,
even if they could legally to control populations there.
And they're not worried about it. In fact,
there's probably people that would be de-incentivized for that.
Yeah.
They don't want their neighbors to have their turkeys.
Nobody thinks like that, do they, Marcus?
I hope not, but I'm just saying.
All right.
We have seen some lines of thought that are very similar to that.
So let's get to where it worked.
All right. Yeah. Let me hear it.
In the context of the situation where it worked is very different
from those other programs where it didn't work.
And it's probably not very applicable to the situation with turkeys,
but I thought it would be dishonest of me not to present a scenario where it did work, right?
Yeah.
Is this the only one you could find?
This is the only one I could find. Yes.
Well, I think that's important. We've done that throughout the whole
theme of the show, and I think that has hopefully built some trust with people that
we're trying to be balanced and cover what is available to cover.
And I don't care whether they work or not, but you just lined up a whole bunch of compelling
instances where they very clearly did not work.
Yeah.
And you even started it with Webster's Dictionary to
give it a name of why it doesn't work before we even started.
You know what? I'm going to buy a Webster's Dictionary right now.
I don't know whether to take that as a compliment or an insult.
I thought it was a, of, I mean, now hindsight's 2020, right?
Now looking back on it, I see what you did there and I think it was perfect.
Well, I appreciate it. I needed your validation today.
All right, let's get into Gosling and Baker. And this is really informative,
not only because it's an example of a successful program,
but it also gives us a lot of clues as to what we, the way we might want to go about this if we did
want to implement a program that would potentially be effective at the desired objective.
All right, so this paper is Gosling and Baker. It was published in 1989 and it focused on
two species that were introduced into Britain during the 1920s and they were muskrats and
nutria rats, which I'd never heard them called. Apparently they call it over there, they call
them coipus, nutria, they call them coipus. Good name.
Did you know that? No.
I had to look it up. I had to look up the scientific name and that's why we use
scientific names. So all of you students out there that are listening and that complain,
particularly if- I don't speak Latin.
Particularly those in my Habitat class that are mad about learning Latin for the lab exam next
week, this is why we do it. None of them are listening right now, Will.
I have at least one student in my current Habitat class that listens, I know. So shout out.
You better be studying. Yeah, you better be studying right now.
All right, so muskrats and nutria rats in Britain. So two species that were introduced,
happened in the 1920s. When it happened, apparently the folks in that area were familiar
with muskrats potentially being a damaging invasive species. So they started an eradication
campaign really soon after that species was first introduced in 1932 and they made use of overseas
expertise as well as a control strategy that was designed by pest control specialists that
had experience working with the species. So they ended up being successful in that regard and they
were paying trappers as part of this program, but they were also specifying where they trapped
and their level of trapping effort. And they were continuing to maintain this relatively high
consistent level of trapping effort by paying those trappers in this scenario. And that's what
led, they believe, to the success of the program. You combine that approach with the fact that they
included the experts. And then on top of that, it was shortly after the species was introduced while
its population was still becoming established. So they weren't completely naturalized within
that area yet. Yeah. And you definitely have, you're more effective when you're in that part
of their establishment. Exactly. Because perfect case in point, the Nutria program wasn't as
successful because they weren't as familiar with the species and they didn't start eradication
efforts as quickly after introduction. Well, what I was thinking about, it sounds like to me,
instead of the incentive being on a per animal basis, they were incentivizing by paying a person
to focus on an area. Yes. And it didn't depend on how many they caught. Here's the details. So I'll
go ahead and lay that out for you. I'm sorry, I should have went ahead and done that. So the way
they went about it is they used detailed population simulations to plan the number of trappers that
they needed. They planned out the time that they estimated they'd need for eradication and the
likely cost of the campaign. And then they used an incentive bonus scheme to overcome the problem
that trappers would work themselves out of a job. Trapper deployment was planned using capture to
trapping effort ratios and progress was monitored by biologists. So it was a very hands-on program.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I was just trying to think of how could you possibly implement that at scale
for turkeys? That's the problem. How do you do it at scale? How does he scale that up?
Well, even- It's conceivable maybe to do it in a small area.
Well, even a group, let's say a group of landowners hires a trapper.
Like now you're focusing on an area, they're getting paid
to trap that area, not necessarily based on the number of individuals they remove.
I'm just trying to think of what is, you know, that might be a more realistic thing to accomplish.
A group of landowners get together and they want to focus a bunch of effort on their area.
I'm just thinking how could we take what we learned in that study and design that?
Right.
And maybe it already is designed that way where you pay a trapper to catch as many as possible
during a window of time in an area. Mm-hmm. I mean, is that what you do
when you pay somebody to come trap your land? Yeah. Maybe it's already structured like that.
So in that type of incentive program already works fine.
Yeah.
That's interesting. I don't see how we could do it at a larger scale.
Yeah.
But I'm sure somebody has ideas and they're going to leave them in our comments.
Okay.
So once we get through all the hate, maybe we'll have some good ideas down there.
Hey, and you added a new word to your, a new term to your vocabulary today, perverse incentive.
I'm going to highlight it in my Webster's dictionary.
That's highlighted in my notes.
Well, I feel like, how did I start out the episode now? I already forgot where you're...
I asked you if you had your ladle.
Oh, it was a hot take. I do feel like it was a hot take.
Was it a hot take?
It was a hot take. Essentially what I heard is the way that they have been implemented
for a long time, that a predator bounties largely just don't work.
Yeah. And if this does end up being a widely circulated episode,
and you were listening to us for the first time, know that our goal in covering information like
this is not to prevent someone from doing something, but to help them allocate their
effort towards the most productive activities possible. And from what we've gone through,
it doesn't seem like predator bounties are a good way for us to spend our time, money, and efforts
to try to restore or increase turkey populations. And so the benefit that that gives us is now we
know we can focus on something else that will be.
Right. Well, let's just walk through that real quick. And I agree with you 100%. That's what
we're trying to accomplish here. But I know that, for example, the state agency catches a lot of
pressure and you can just name one, it doesn't matter. They get pressure to have a bounty program,
but that would require them to use part of their funding to pay for it.
And it's very unlikely from what we just talked about to be an effective strategy since we've
repeatedly tried it in all kinds of systems and situations and it basically just didn't work,
except for in the one that would cost a lot more time and effort and money where you'd have to have
really close tracking of it. And I don't know how you could do that even at the state level.
Well, that's the problem is like in the muskrat nutria example, I mean, those were newly
established populations that were very, very geographically limited in their distribution.
Yeah. Maybe in a county you could do that, but it'd be very hard to do that at a larger scale.
But my point is, that's not to say that there isn't a place for predator removal.
Right.
Like I said earlier, you and I are both actively in research to try to understand how effective
that can be. But it would, based on what we've just talked about, it would be a waste of resources
to do a bounty program to achieve that. But those same resources could be diverted to something more
effective like training people how to trap, for example. Or what we're more fond of is teaching
them to manage their land, the habitat. Or from the state's perspective, let's hire more
technical assistance biologists that can go out and consult with private landowners to help them
improve the wildlife habitat quality on their land.
Right. That's what I'm, my whole point is, you know, there's plenty of scrutiny about how we
allocate funding. And, you know, there's a lot of pressure in some situations, I see it and I hear
about it all the time, I assume there's a lot of pressure to allocate resources to something like
a bounty program. And it would probably be better served to allocate those resources and other
things that are more likely to move the needle. We only have so much time and money, let's make
sure that we're putting it where it's going to most effectively help us accomplish our objective
of increasing turkey populations. Yes.
Was that a mic? I think so.
It's a really small one. I like to use the...
It's like a little violin. I use the finesse mics.
I don't know. A finesse mic?
I don't know. I'm just making it up.
A finesse mic. I'm going to include that in my vernacular.
Yeah, that's a real thing, right?
I'm just learning that.
No, I'm just making it up.
A finesse mic. Well, that was a really good one.
I enjoyed it.
Hope you all enjoyed it out there. We're trying to, you know, keep up with timely topics. And
we thought this would be one that folks want to hear about because...
It was based on listener feedback because we get so much feedback about bounties.
Yeah. It's brought up all the time. And I've, you know, we kind of de facto end up in this
in lots of ways when we're working together, you kind of end up being the predator guy,
which I guess stems from the fact that you've done work, like you've researched a lot of stuff
related to it. But yeah, I was really interested in the topic and to see where you went with it.
Yeah. Was it as interesting as you had hoped? Did it live up to your expectations?
You know, I feel like it was a little bit of a finesse mic drop instead of a,
you know, like a big Yeti mic drop.
You wanted a boom mic drop.
All right. No, it was. I think that was really good. And it did not turn out exactly how I
thought, but that's probably a good thing. Yes. All right. That was fun. Thanks everybody for
listening. Keep the feedback coming and we'll keep exploring these kinds of topics.
Wild Turkey Science is part of the Natural Resources University Podcast Network and is
made possible by Turkeys for Tomorrow, a grassroots organization dedicated to the
wild turkey. To learn more about TFT, check out turkeysfortomorrow.org.