Hunting and gathering are the oldest subsistence practices and are ancestral to humans themselves. Hunting evolved alongside hominids and remains an integral part of the cultures of many Indigenous and traditional peoples. However, in today’s increasingly urbanized world, any form of hunting is often viewed as cruel and as a threat to biodiversity and the environment. Even within scientific and environmentalist circles, this distinction is frequently overlooked. As a result, command-and-control agencies tend to indiscriminately crack down on all hunters, leading to reprisals, penalties, and the criminalization of populations that rely on hunting for both their physical and cultural survival.
This roundtable aims to present an overview—from different regions of the world—of the dilemmas surrounding the repression of Indigenous and traditional peoples who practice subsistence hunting within contexts of multiple and communal uses of natural resources in their territories. We intend to address the challenges faced, as well as recent advances in recognizing customary law, formalizing safeguards, and decriminalizing subsistence hunting. The goal is to encourage broad participation from attendees and to gather diverse testimonies and perspectives on the controversies surrounding hunting within the context described here.