A literature review of legal hunting practices

Humans have always hunted for food, recreation, sport or cultural reasons. However, legal hunting practices are increasingly being challenged on sustainability and animal welfare grounds, even if hunting can contribute to reach biodiversity objectives (Di Minin et al. 2016). Previous reviews have especially focused on illegal hunting (Benítez-López et al. 2016). In order to collect information on the sustainability of hunting we reviewed the peer-reviewed English language literature on legal hunting. We used 26 hunting related terms to search for all the literature on legal hunting on WebofScience. We focused on terrestrial ecosystems and species, therefore excluding fishing and whaling. Th…