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Determining Economic Value of Wildlife-Game Animals

When trying to assess the cost of protecting some wildlife species by managing other wildlife species, determining cost-effectiveness becomes much more difficult. This is because the economic value of wildlife differs for everyone, with wildlife providing both tangible and intangible benefits to people. Intangible benefits are unquantifiable but still real. Tangible benefits, on the other hand, can usually be expressed monetarily (Conover 2002).

Getting back to coyote predation, if a wildlife manager is trying to limit the number of coyotes, through management actions, to increase the number of antelope for hunting in a certain area, how does the manager determine whether it is cost effective to manage coyotes? Determining the cost of the management action is not so difficult. This was discussed previously. The difficult question is how to determine the value of the antelope.

One way to determine the value of the antelope is to assign it a monetary value equal to the amount of money a hunter coming to hunt the antelope would bring to the local economy. One western natural resource agency has assigned a value of $3,000 to an antelope, believing that that is the amount a hunter spends on beer, ammunition, food, lodging and other items when coming to the area to hunt antelope. After coyote management is undertaken for a length of time, and antelope populations increase, one can multiply the number of antelope (by which local herds have increased) by $3,000 and get a value of the coyote management. If this figure is divided by the cost of the management action and the resulting number is greater than "1," the management is cost beneficial.

Often analyses like the above are done with a range of values for the wildlife species. Antelope, for instance, can be valued in other ways. A study somewhere may have assigned a "watchable wildlife" or aesthetic value to an animal. Another agency may have assigned a different economic value to the antelope. Alternatively, the civil penalty for illegally poaching an animal (e.g., $10,000 fine for the antelope) can be construed to be its value. Ultimately, economists must pick the most believable value, i.e. the one best supported by data and accepted by the largest range of people. The most believable values are usually going to be those values that reflect what that species contributes to society's economy. For game species that's easier to do than for endangered species.