Do wildlife laws work?
Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, Regent’s Park, London NW1 4RY, UK. Legislation for the protection of species is a global conservation tool. However, in many developing countries lack of resources means that effectiveness relies on voluntary compliance, leading to contradictory assumptions. On one hand, laws introduced without effective enforcement mechanisms carry an implicit assumption that voluntary compliance will occur. On the other hand, it is often openly assumed that, without enforcement, there will in fact be no compliance. Which assumption holds has rarely been rigorously tested. Here we show that laws for the protection of some species of large mammal have no effect on the prey choice patterns of primarily commercial hunters in the Democratic Republic of Congo, confirming the second assumption. We established this result by using an optimal diet model to predict the pattern of prey choice in the absence of regulation. Prey choice patterns predicted by the
