A few decades ago, when the market was booming, Florida wild gator hides reportedly sold for up to $35 a linear foot. Now, trappers hope their skins might fetch $7 a foot if they’re fortunate. (Stephens, who has been a nuisance trapper for less than a decade, says he once sold hides for $28.50 a linear foot but now can hardly find a bulk buyer.) Plus, Stephens explains, he and others in the sector fight the perception that “you trappers are getting rich off the hides,” as he says a state politician put it to him once. He showed the legislator his mileage logs for nuisance calls. At a cost of nearly $200 per gator, Stephens says he was much closer to breaking even than getting rich from trapping.
The idea of using market incentives to manage wildlife and game is not especially common, but neither is it unknown. Watkins points out the Australian kangaroo market as another example:
That’s basically the approach that Australia has taken to manage its estimated 50 million kangaroos, which damage crops, forage pastures, and destroy fairways across much of the country. Licensed cullers are permitted to hunt ’roos and sell their game products to processors and distributors. In recent years, the kangaroo market has evolved and broadened, as National Geographic recently reported: “Global brands such as Nike, Puma, and Adidas buy strong, supple ‘k-leather’ to make athletic gear. And kangaroo meat, once sold mainly as pet food, is finding its way into more and more grocery stores and high-end restaurants.” Australia sells kangaroo products to more than 50 countries and earned $29 million in exports from the animal products in 2017.
Market forces are clearly powerful enough to threaten species with extinction: indeed, market forces from hunting to land development are why the alligator nearly became extinct. Another prominent example that I\’ve discussed of market forces driving a species to near-extinction is the American buffalo (see here and here). Clearly, the power of an unregulated and unrestrained market can be environmentally destructive. But the the power of a regulated and restrained market can be a tool for environmental gains (for example, via cap-and-trade pollution permits) and wildlife management, too.