Wildlife hunting, for meat and skins, is an important component of the rural economy in Argentinian Patagonia. Every year thousands of fur-bearing mammals are killed and the impact of this on their populations is unknown. This paper reports on the results of a preliminary investigation into the sustainability of the harvest of culpeo foxes Dusicyon culpaeus in a 1000-sq-km area of Neuquen Province. Monitoring of fox densities and harvest rates over 5 years on six ranches revealed that, despite intense hunting, the numbers of foxes remained little changed. On the other hand, life-table analysis suggested that the levels of hunting pressure on four ranches were too high to allow fox populations to persist unless they were boosted by immigration. The findings have applications for wildlife managers in establishing sustainable harvest rates and optimal spatial distribution of those rates.

Setting priorities for wildlife conservation in the Peruvian Amazon must deal with a variety of issues, including subsistence and commercial hunting, loss of habitat from deforestation, and the international trade in wildlife and wildlife products. However, what is the rank of these priorities for wildlife conservation in Peruvian Amazonia? One way to evaluate priorities for wildlife conservation is by determining how different human activities affect the number of animals removed from the populations. This yields a measure of the impact of these activities on animal populations and enables wildlife managers to rank priorities for wildlife conservation efforts.

When the Yuquí Indians of Bolivia adopted a settled life-style in the 1960s, wild animals continued to be their main source of meat. As a result, game species declined in numbers around their settlement and their problems were exacerbated by colonists seeking new lands to farm. Prospects brightened in 1992 when 115,000 ha of land were designated Yuquí Indigenous Territory. This paper describes how a system of satellite camps was developed to enable the Yuquí to exploit game animals sustainably and to defend their land from encroachment.

A small-mammal hunting study was carried out in north-western Ecuador from October 1992 to October 1993, employing interview and trapping methods to document rodent and marsupial hunting by Chachi Indian and Afroecuadorian families. Based on 109 family interviews in 28 communities, it was determined that log-fall traps were used around family gardens and along forest trails. Afroecuadorian families used more than twice the number of traps than Chachis and trap lines of both ethnic groups were left open for approximately 6 days per trapping session. Chachi families left trap lines closed twice sas long as Afroecuadorian families. There were 857 individuals of seven rodent and four marsupial species trapped during the study, with Proechimys semispinosus representing more than 50 per cent of the small mammals trapped.

This paper examines the impact of hunting on the conservation of large Neotropical primates (≥ 6 kg adult body mass) and of the forest they inhabit. A greater emphasis on the in-situ conservation of large cebids outside protected areas and close to people is advocated and research priorities are suggested to support the conservation of large primates imperilled by hunting.

Wild animals have played an important role in the lives of Maya Indians but recent evidence from a small Maya community in south-eastern Mexico suggests that their importance as a source of food may be diminishing. The persistence of subsistence hunting despite low kill rates suggests that hunting is still culturally important to the Maya community as a whole. By combining subsistence hunting with other subsistence and commercial activities, such as gardening and the extraction of chicle latex from sapodilla trees Manilkara zapota, contemporary Maya hunters are preserving a culturally important activity while simultaneously adapting to internal and external pressures to modernize their society.

The shift to the use of shotguns from traditional hunting weapons has often been mentioned as one of the factors contributing to over-hunting in the tropics. It has also been argued that indigenous people using traditional hunting methods are conservationists because they do not over-exploit natural resources. A study of two Indian communities in south-eastern Peru, one of which hunted with guns and the other with traditional weapons, found that there was little difference in the amount of meat consumed per capita in each village and that shotgun hunters were no more exploitative than the traditional hunters.