In theory, there's a few ways.
Notably, there's the "hydra effect", which is the perplexing phenomenon whereby culling a population may cause it to come back stronger later. (There was a piece in the New Scientist about this a couple of weeks ago.
Second, in cases where the population of one animal is large, that might crowd out other animals, and become self-perpetuating. So, for example, there's a kind of starfish that is an incredibly voracious eater of coral; since coral reefs support all kinds of other life, culling that starfish in areas where it's been introduced and has no natural predators will be good for the ecosystem generally (assuming that we're not willing to wait the 300 000 years it might take for a local predator to develop a taste for them). Similarly, killing moose (and protecting wolves) has had an incredible regenerative effect on places like Yellowstone, because it allows for saplings to develop, which means greater landscape diversity, and more niches. (There's a wonderful novel called Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong that deals with the relationship between herders and wolves in Mongolia, by the way.)
It's not obvious that any of this applies to critically endangered animals, though. And the argument about moose might not translate easily to predators like lions.
Here's another argument - more anthropocentric in tone. By allowing permit hunting, you're actually providing an incentive for locals to conserve the population of game, on the basis that it then provides them with a source of income. More, a hard currency injection into an economy makes that economy richer, which does something to reduce subsistence farming, which reduces human/ game conflict, which reduces the need for quite so much game to be killed.
Again, that might not always work - eliminating fishing quotas in the North Sea is less likely to incentivise conservation as to lead to everyone going out to catch as much cod as possible before it's extinguished - but the crucial thing here would be regulation. Unregulated hunting may be a disaster - but regulated hunting mightn't be.
Which doesn't make it any less repugnant. But, if the argument works, we may have a reason to hold our noses and accept it for the greater good.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Wed 29 Jul 2015, 11:56,
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A moose once bit my sister.
I totally support the culling of animals like deer which are overcrowding their environment and are also delicious.
But I can't get behind reducing populations numbering in the 100's or 1000's living in massive open spaces just because a dentist wants the thrill of bloodlust and some locals want a few grand.
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Cerebus Sticky! Sticky! Stick! Stick!, Wed 29 Jul 2015, 12:35,
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