Sunday, January 11, 2009

Invasive squirrel bounty

The invasive species posting are all a twitter with excitement. The British are eating their invasive species, the eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis),. This effectively places a market price on the invasive species and should lead to an unintended consequences so familiar to readers of this web log (The Dignity of Invasive Species, Saturday, October 11, 2008).

A system of control based upon creating a market can have the reasonable effect of inspiring a business plan which calls for the raising for sale of the invasive species, for profit. The next step would then be to make such practice illegal, adding social costs of enforcement, but like addictive drugs and boot-legged computer programs, market pressures and not the law will decide how many are raised for dinner.

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