Wildlife Law is a comprehensive and readable primer that provides an overview of U.S. wildlife law for a broad audience, including professionals who work with wildlife or who manage wildlife habitat, students across the spectrum of natural resource courses, landowners, developers, hunters, guides, and those associated with the field of private game ranching.   Authors Eric T. Freyfogle and Dale D. Goble are legal scholars who are experts in wildlife law. This book is the first ever to survey the entire field, covering state and federal law with a strong grounding in wildlife science. The writing style is lively and engaging, with descriptions of unusual and intriguing cases that illustrate key points and bring to life the importance and intricacies of the field.   The book includes thirteen chapters on topics such as   • what wildlife law is, what it covers, and what it seeks to achieve; • constitutional issues and key federal statutes; • wildlife liability issues, from spider bites to escaped zoo animals; • state game laws, hunting and fishing rights of Indian tribes; • and the Endangered Species Act.   Wildlife Law fills a long-standing gap in the literature and introduces readers to the basics of wildlife law while exploring such current controversies as endangered species protection, tribal fishing rights, game ranches, and the challenges of constructing wildlife corridors. It is a much-needed addition to the bookshelf of everyone working with or concerned about wildlife in the United States. "In this primer on Wildlife Law , the authors have produced a text that is both easy to read and very interesting." ― Wildlife Activist Eric T. Freyfogle is the Max L. Rowe Professor of Law at the University of Illinois. He has written widely for professional and general audiences on land ownership, natural resources law, and environmental policy. Dale D. Goble is the Margaret Wilson Schimke Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Idaho. His research and writing focus on the conservation of biodiversity. Wildlife Law A Primer By Eric T. Freyfogle, Dale D. Goble ISLAND PRESS Copyright © 2009 Island Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-55963-976-7 Contents Title Page, Copyright Page, Dedication, Preface, CHAPTER 1 - The Basics, CHAPTER 2 - State Ownership and the Public Interest, CHAPTER 3 - Capturing and Owning, CHAPTER 4 - Wildlife on Private Land, CHAPTER 5 - Inland Fisheries, CHAPTER 6 - The Constitutional Framework, CHAPTER 7 - State Game Laws and Liability for Harm, CHAPTER 8 - Indian Tribal Rights, CHAPTER 9 - Key Federal Statutes, CHAPTER 10 - Wildlife on Federal Lands, CHAPTER 11 - The Endangered Species Act: Species Listing and Critical Habitat, CHAPTER 12 - The Endangered Species Act: Protections, CHAPTER 13 - Biodiversity at the Landscape Scale, Acknowledgments, Notes, Further Reading, Index, About the Authors, CHAPTER 1 The Basics * * * Wildlife law is the body of legal rules and processes that have to do with wild things—with the interactions people have with wild things, and with the interactions among people themselves that relate to wild things. It is as simple and as wide ranging as that. The term "wild things," of course, is a vague one, just as the term "wildlife" is vague, but lawmakers have ways of taking vague terms and giving them greater precision, even when the precision is arbitrary. For the most part, the law considered in this book deals with animals. It does so because human disputes over wild things have largely dealt with animals. The law pays far less attention to plants, and then usually just to domesticated and human-engineered ones. Among wild plants, only the rarest and weediest show up in the law. This divide reflects a fundamental difference in the law: plants are part of land (and thus belong to the landowner), while animals are not, a point we shall address. As for the many single-celled organisms that are neither plant nor animal, they also make few appearances in the law's annals, save as minor characters in disputes about diseases and, more recently, intellectual property rights. All life, of course, depends on these single-celled creatures. The law, though, gives them scant attention, and so shall we. The place to begin any study of law is with the basics of law itself—where it comes from, why it exists, what forms it takes, and how it changes. So accustomed are we to the idea and presence of law that we rarely take time to think about it. The law that we're talking about, of course, is human-created law. Some person or group, somewhere at some time, created the law, and did so for particular reasons. Sometimes the reasons are unclear, and the law can seem mysterious. But all law exists for a purpose. When we understand the law's purposes, it becomes easier to understand the law itself. Much law deals with problems that arise among people. Other laws help people accomplish tasks that would