Recent epidemics of avian influenza, foot-and-mouth disease, rabies, and classical swine fever have brought to public attention the issue of disease eradication in wildlife, as the consequences of pathogen spillover from wildlife reservoir to livestock and human population can be very dramatic. The reduction of population density by hunting or culling (i.e., selective removal of animal) is often perceived as the simplest and most effective way to control diseases in wild populations. Simple mathematical models show that when population density drops below a critical threshold level, as a consequence of culling or hunting, the pathogen cannot persist in the population because of a reduction in the contact rate between infective and susceptible individuals. However, these models usually assume that culling or hunting rate are constant in time. Moreover, the analysis of direct and indirect costs of culling (or of not culling) has been usually neglected in the literature of wild animal diseases.
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