Hunter demography in Central Bosnia Canton

Abstract

UDK 639.1.057(497.6)

According to UNECE/FAO, hunting is the second most important function of forests in Europe. Today in the EU we have over 7 million of hunters and within this field, 120.000 people are employed. Bosnia-Herzegovina, as a country with still preserved natural resources and potentials for intensive game management, has almost no income in this field. Reasons are numerous: Lack of proper legislation in this field, black market, poor education of hunters, and all these reasons cause most important: lack of game animals.

For creating any serious program of hunting development in Bosnia- Herzegovina, we need to know real conditions at the field. This presumes an inventory of Bosnian hunting grounds and game populations, but also an inventory of Bosnian hunters, their demographic structure, opinions, and requests.

We conducted research with a questionnaire amongst 12 hunting organizations in Central Bosnia Canton and tested 30% of all hunters in the area.

In the research area, 30, 87 % of tested hunters have primary school or lower and 61 % are with high school. According to this, education has a high priority.

The age structure of hunters in Central Bosnia Canton is almost dramatic. Lack of younger categories points that young people lose interest in hunting, or have a kind of aversion. Monthly incomes of hunters have a strong influence to the possibility of being hunters which is very expensive, as shown in the answer at the question: «Are shooting taxes high? ». Almost 70% of hunter has monthly incomes not higher than 400, 00 KM, and monthly life costs in Central Bosnia are 441, 00 KM.

Considering most of the expressed opinions about the significance of hunting in their home area and proposals for improving it, we can say that game protection and poaching are the most important problems in nowadays situation. Those opinions come from people who spend most of their time at the field and have a real impressions about game condition. So it's not only up to the hunters but to Government institutions as well to support applying of Law and create new legislation.

This paper is the beginning of inventory in Bosnia-Herzegovina game management and Hunting, for its improvement and putting it into deserved place as an important way of active recreation, sport, and tool for rural development.