Wildlife royalties – a future for conservation?

Typography

Writing in the journal Animals, they muse on whether organisations that profit in some way from wildlife imagery and popularity, could establish a corporate responsibility to contribute a portion of this income to the conservation of the animals represented.

Writing in the journal Animals, they muse on whether organisations that profit in some way from wildlife imagery and popularity, could establish a corporate responsibility to contribute a portion of this income to the conservation of the animals represented.

Big cats for example, are a marketing dream. From catwalk trends to product branding and sports team representation, their likeness is everywhere and used to sell everything from patriotism to eggs. In fact, as the face of the British Lion Quality Seal, lions sell about 30 million eggs a day in Britain.

Using the product as an example, the paper argues that if a royalty system were introduced, and each lion stamp were to earn the species one tenth of a penny, then every day lion conservation could receive £28,900.That’s £10.5 million a year.

But, the wildlife itself, is in crisis. Again, using lions as an example, the combined effects of everyday human conflicts with local African communities, poaching, habitat loss and trophy hunting mean there are now probably less than 25,000 left in the wild.

Read more at University of Oxford