Pricing rhinos

Louis Theroux reports on the market in big-game hunting in South Africa:  you can pay up to $100,000 for the right to kill a rhino.
Commonsense economics says this is the way to conserve wildlife. If a farmer is given ownership rights over the rhinos on his land and the right to charge hunters to kill rhino, he'll take care to breed rhinos and protect them from other hunters. The result will be more rhinos than if rhinos are unowned - because then the tragedy of the commons will ensure they are hunted to extinction.
Sure enough, some economists have indeed found that private ownership is a great way of conserving wildlife.
Sounds simple. But there's a problem. Property rights have to be enforced. As Theroux points out, that means fencing farms in. And that can be expensive. As this paper (pdf) describes, property rights don't arise from nothing - they only exist if the (private) benefits of establishing them outweigh the costs.
Worse, migratory animals can't be enclosed. And as they migrate, they'll be killed. This paper (pdf) describes how this is a problem for wildebeest in the Serengeti. And it was probably the reason why American bison were hunted almost to extinction in the 1880s; it was just impossible to create private property rights in them.
So, property rights are great in theory. But the practice of creating and maintaining them is a little trickier.

Comments

[Scratch]

$100k a pop?

I'm off to buy a Cow, some grey paint, superglue and a traffic cone.

[OneEyedMan]

You can sell the whole herd and give easement rights to follow it. Imagine a few jeeps with armed men patrolling the herd, keeping it ready for when a hunter feels like paying to take a shot.

[dearieme]

Train lions to herd them.

[aje]

Surely if the transaction costs of enforcement outweigh the economic benefit of adopting property rights that tells us something about the scale of the original "inefficiency"?

Lets not forget that excludability is a function of entrepreneurial activity, it doesn't exist in nature

[jameshigham]

Sure enough, some economists have indeed found that private ownership is a great way of conserving wildlife.

Most certainly logic here. How does this accord with the Marxist principles, Chris?

[Ian]

Hmm, @jameshigham. That's what I was thinking. Standard for a thinking libertarian, but interesting posting for a self-described Marxist.

Is it time you came over to the dark side, Chris?

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For most of the 20th century the continental black rhino was the most numerous of all rhino species. Around 1900 there were probably several hundred thousand living in Africa. During the later half of the 20th century their number severely reduced from an estimated 70,000[7] in the late 1960s to only 10,000 to 15,000 in 1981. In the early 1990s the number dipped below 2500, and in 2004 it was reported that only 2,410 black rhinos remained. According to the International Rhino Foundation, the total African population has since then slightly recovered to 3,610 by 2003. According to a July 2006 report by the World Conservation Union, a recent survey of the West African Black Rhino, which once ranged across the savanna of western Africa but had dropped to just 10, concluded the subspecies to be extinct. The northern white is soon to join the western black rhino on the extinction list as its last noted numbers were as few as 4. The only rhino that has recovered somewhat from the brink of extinction is the southern white whose numbers now are estimated around 14,500, up from fewer than 50 in the first decade of the 20th Century. The Black Rhinoceros has been pushed to the brink of extinction by illegal poaching for their horn and by loss of habitat. The horn is used in traditional Chinese medicine, and is said by herbalists to be able to revive comatose patients, cure fevers, and aid male sexual stamina and fertility. The purported effectiveness of the use of rhino horn in treating any illness has not been confirmed by medical science. In June of 2007, the first-ever documented case of the medicinal sale of black rhino horn in the United States (confirmed by genetic testing of the confiscated horn) occurred at a traditional Chinese medicine supply store in Portland, Oregon's Chinatown. It is used in the Middle East to make ornately carved handles for ceremonial daggers called jambiyas. Demand for these exploded in the 1970s causing the Black Rhinoceros population to decline 96% between 1970 and 1992.