Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Toothless wildlife protection laws

2015; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 24; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s10531-015-0914-8

1572-9710

José Vicente López‐Bao, Juan Carlos Blanco, Alejandro Rodrı́guez, Raquel Godinho, Víctor Sazatornil, Francisco Álvares, Emilio José García, Luís Llaneza, M. Rico, Yolanda Cortés, Vicente Palacios, Guillaume Chapron,

Animal Behavior and Welfare Studies

Granting legal protection to an endangered species has long been considered a major milestone for its conservation and recovery. A multitude of examples such as wolves in the contiguous USA (Boitani 2003) or many large carnivore populations in Europe (Chapron et al. 2014) have revealed how instrumental wildlife protection laws can be for species recovery. However, legal obligations to conserve endangered species may be useless if the rule of law is not properly enforced. Such situation is not exclusive to countries with political instability or weak institutional capacities but can also be relevant, for instance, to member states of the European Union and therefore bound to European legislation on nature conservation.