Global warming?

[Henry]

Remember the book and movie Never Cry Wolf? Excellent book, btw, by Farley Mowat. Anyway, it's a true story about when Mowat was sent by the Canadien gov't into the great white north to figure out what was happening to the caribou herds, whose populations had been dropping precipitously. The native innuit needed caribou to survive and were blaming the wolves for their decimation. Mowat found different, but his gov't wouldn't believe him - if not eating the caribou, what could the wolves possibly survive on? Having witnessed wolves hunting, Mowat proved a large carnivore could survive very well on field mice alone by using himself as an example - he ate nothing but mice for the winter. He also proved that wolves were only taking a small number of caribou, the old, sick, and weak caribou, which served to strengthen the herd, not decimate it. So what, then, was killing all the caribou?

Poachers. The locals, innuit and anglo, were overhunting the caribou and falsely blaming the wolves.

My point is: why do we never seem to see an accounting of how much poaching affects polar bear numbers? If poaching unnoticed by offialdom could drastically lower the population of herd animals of huge numbers, poaching could easily decimate the polar bear population.

There must be some prospective number assigned to poaching, but this brings another question: While you can know the number of times poachers were caught and perhaps extrapolate a poaching harvest number, how do you measure what you haven't seen, those you haven't caught?