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1 results

  • 4 - Hunting Optimally

  • Julia E. Fa, Stephan M. Funk, Robert Nasi
  • Book:
    Hunting Wildlife in the Tropics and Subtropics
    Published online:
    25 August 2022
    Print publication:
    01 September 2022, pp 123-148
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  • Summary

    Humans and other animals face decisions on which food items to harvest, when to quit searching and when to move on to the next patch. This chapter starts by describing optimal foraging theory (OFT), which has been used to understand and to predict foraging behaviour in animals as well as humans. We follow this by describing how cultural issues, such as taboos and religious beliefs, can affect optimal foraging in humans. We describe how OFT has been applied to human foraging and why it has been criticized by some researchers. We show that a number of alternatives to OFT models applied to humans have been suggested. Because there are different prey species and food is not distributed uniformly, prey and foraging space must be selected by human foragers. We continue by defining group hunting and sexual division in hunting roles as crucial elements in human foraging strategies. We end the chapter by discussing conservation and sustainability and linking this to the ecologically noble savage concept introduced in the previous chapter.