Local trapping as predator control in rural Alaska: limiting factors in Allakaket and Alatna and the potential for increased community involvement in wildlife management

Abstract

For a community to be involved in natural resources management that community must have the capacity to make management actions. The capacity for a community to be involved in natural resources management or to take management action might be dependent on a wide variety of factors, largely based upon the resource and asset base available to a community. Aerial wolf control as a wildlife management strategy in the state of Alaska is a controversial endeavor. In the rural villages of Allakaket and Alatna wolf trapping was traditionally a commonly practiced subsistence activity but local levels of wolf trapping are currently very low. The State of Alaska began performing aerial wolf control around Allakaket and Alatna in February 2013 per the request of local residents but the program took more than a decade to come to fruition. To investigate the factors that have led to the decline in local wolf trapping in Allakaket and Alatna and to determine if local trapping could be increased as a means of predator control this study adopted a modified analytic induction methodology. Four propositions and hypotheses were developed regarding the decline in local trapping and the potential to increase local wolf trapping. The propositions and hypotheses were based on the ideas that 1) a community must possess the capacity to take action in order to do so, 2) The benefits of action must outweigh the costs, 3 ) local norms and values must support an action for it to occur, and 4) management roles, responsibilities, and power-dynamics between communities and management agencies can affect the action of a community. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 residents of Allakaket and Alatna to gather data relevant to the propositions and hypotheses. A codebook was developed and Randolph's Free-Marginal Multirater Kappa was calculated with acceptable levels of inter-coder reliability resulting for each code (k >̲ .80). Codes were used to organize data from each interview, which were then used to test the hypotheses. Local norms and values do not appear to be limiting local trapping, the community recognizes the benefits of local trapping to outweigh the costs, and the community also recognizes itself to have a responsibility to take management action, so management power dynamics do not appear to be limiting trapping. The community may not have the full capacity to increase local trapping as a form of local wolf control, as the resources or motivation to organize an increase in local trapping are not being realized within the community. Furthermore, a generation gap was identified that appears to be limiting the ability of the community to connect potential trapping students with teachers to revive and perpetuate the local tradition of trapping.