Study: Current Snaring Practices Threaten Africa’s Wildlife

18 June 2025, Africa: A new paper in BioScience estimates that tens of millions of kilograms of wild meat are wasted every year due to snaring — a common hunting method that uses spring-loaded traps to catch wild animals

The study synthesizes research from dozens of studies to reveal the drivers, scale and impacts of snaring. The findings show this practice currently poses a severe and unsustainable threat to wildlife populations. However, there are opportunities to mitigate risks with changes to governance and enforcement, as well as by reducing demand for wild meat in cities.

Snares are used to catch wildlife primarily for income generation, food and crop protection but also for social and cultural reasons.

“Snaring is an important source of food and income for many people. But in many parts of Africa, its current scale and impacts are threatening the sustainability of hunting systems and other benefits that wildlife populations bring to communities and individuals. By synthesizing data and findings from across the continent, our paper elevates the importance of snaring as a regional-scale sustainability issue,” said University of California Santa Barbara-based Sean Denny, first author of the study.

Despite its prevalence, it is difficult to study the scale and impacts of snaring, as the use of snares is often illegal and, while widely used by rural communities, snares are very hard to detect. As a result, there has historically been a lack of data to measure its impact.

This study combined snaring surveys from across Africa to reveal the geographical extent and local intensity of snaring, as well as the diversity of species affected and its impacts on wildlife populations and sustainability. It argues for urgent action to protect wildlife in ways that continue to benefit hunters and communities.

Key findings:

• Prevalence:
  • Snaring occurs across Africa’s forests, savannahs and in every major region of Sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Depending on the type of hunter, one hunter can manage up to 500 snares at once, resulting in an estimated tens of millions of snares set every year.
  • Most terrestrial and semi-aquatic animals above 0.5 kg are probably vulnerable to snaring.
• Waste:
  • ≥ tens of millions of kilograms of wild meat is likely wasted every year across Africa due to snaring. Snares typically do not discriminate between species, age, sex or size categories, meaning they sometimes capture unintended wildlife (bycatch), which hunters can discard.
  • Captured animals often rot or are scavenged by other animals before hunters check snares, leading to further waste.
• Animal welfare:
  • Snaring causes particularly stressful deaths for animals due to starvation, dehydration, injuries and attacks from other animals.
  • Animals who escape sometimes have fatal injuries, but even if they survive after escaping, they may have lower chances of long-term survival and/or be less likely to reproduce due to injuries.

To address the negative impacts of snaring, the study’s authors make several broad recommendations:

1. Incentivize sustainable use of wild meat at the local level through devolution of hunting governance and management.
2. Continue to improve law enforcement and snare removals in protected areas
3. Reduce the demand for wild meat in urban areas, where wild meat is often consumed as a luxury food
4. Provide alternative sources of employment to hunting and increase the availability of domestic meat in rural areas and small towns.

Quotes

“One of the most important contributions of our study is showing that snaring is very difficult to regulate through top-down approaches alone,” said University of California Santa Barbara-based Sean Denny, first author of the study. “Hunters can easily and legally obtain materials to make snares, and snares are very difficult for law enforcement to detect. As a result, efforts to address snaring will need to include policies that incentivize sustainable practices among hunters themselves.”

“This study highlights the importance of devolving governance and management rights and responsibilities to local communities, where hunting practices can be managed at a local level,” said Lauren Coad, Senior Scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) and co-founder of the Sustainable Use of Wild Species Transformative Partnership Platform. “Small changes in hunting methods, such as the types of snares used, their placement and timely checking, could have benefits for both biodiversity and local communities. Next steps need to be to trial the changes suggested in this paper, to measure whether these changes could be effective.”

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