What's the best way to protect wildlife?

Killing animals for animals' good. Not many will buy the explanation given by Nature Conservancy to defend Chinese e-commerce tycoon Jack Ma's hunting spree in Britain. Ma, who is also a director on the board of the animal protection group, hunted 11 stags in Britain two years ago. In a recent report on Chinese nouveaux riches, The Sunday Times describes their newfound "wild" hobbies and says that Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, and his 11 traveling companies spent ￡36,000 pounds to rent a castle and hire a helicopter for their hunting trip.

The hunting story has all the elements of an extravagant potboiler. It describes the naked display of wealth by China's nouveaux riches both at home and abroad, their luxurious lifestyle that is in sharp contrast to the poverty that many people live in, the pleasure they derive from "slaughtering" wild animals and the bad reputation they have earned.

Ma has admitted on his online page that the trip was "quite expensive" but insists that he did so for "environmental protection".

It's lot easier for people to lambast rich people taking part in even controlled hunting than to agree on the best way to protect wildlife. Ma's case once again brought to the fore the controversy surrounding hunting.

These are not the times of hunter-gatherers; very few people across the world hunt for food and fur. By the 19th century hunting had become a fun sport and led to the slaughtering of millions of animals and birds, from Africa and Asia to the New World. And although hunting may become more of a fun sport, it remains controversial. In fact, some animal rights activists believe modern-day hunting is nothing but killing.

But some researchers consider regulated hunting an efficient way of managing wildlife populations, saying it could facilitate the recovery of the ecosystem and help the growth in the numbers of wild animals. Legal hunting, which they say is easier to be regulated, could curb poaching, which affects the sex, birth and mortality rates of wildlife populations.

More importantly, authorized hunting can generate funds, which apart from wildlife protection can also be spent on local residents to make them realize that protecting wildlife makes good financial sense. For instance, African countries such as Zimbabwe and Cameron have instituted legal hunting programs that require people to pay huge amounts to hunt some selected, mostly aged animals. Authorized hunting programs generate estimated annual revenue of $200 million for the sub-Saharan region.

Even in Australia, an advanced economy, kangaroo shooting has developed into a big industry despite the animal being a "mascot" of the country. The reason: hunting keeps the kangaroo numbers in control to the benefit of the environment and, at the same time, boosts the economy.

Most people agree that wildlife protection is necessary, but differences crop up when it comes to the methods to be used for the purpose. For example, is it acceptable to release possibly poisonous snakes in a park, as a woman in Qingyuan, Guandong province, has been shown as doing in a series of photographs widely circulated on the Internet on Tuesday? The person who took the photographs in July has said that he recognized some of the snakes to be cobras, prompting local police to start an investigation into the incident.

Something similar, but on larger scale, happened in 2012 when some Beijing tourists set free several thousand snakes in Xinglong county of Hebei province, creating panic among local farmers and forcing them to call a "snake strike".

Recent years have seen many "wildlife activists" take such "set-free" actions. But many of the animals they set free didn't survive because they couldn't adapt to the local conditions in the wild. Besides, abrupt introduction of animals could break the balance of the local ecosystem. Moreover, the more purchase of wild animals to set them free, unfortunately the more poaches for sale.

Therefore, we have to find the most scientific way of protecting wildlife. And until we do that, we have to understand that killing wild animals is not always wrong, and forcing them to live not always right.

The author is an editor with China Daily. zhuping@chinadaily.com.cn