In Burkina Faso, most of the wildlife farms hosting touristic visits, which started out with great enthusiasm, are now closed, highlighting the need for sustainable wildlife farm management. Although also of interest for wildlife farming, most of the study dealing with sustainable animal farm management are focus on livestock farming. This study was motivated by the need to provide an answer to the question of sustainable management of wildlife farming in Burkina Faso. To this end, our aim is to assess the suitability of wild animals to promote sustainable management of an ex-situ wildlife farm, hosting touristic visits. The implementation of a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) process enabled us, among other things, to identify the wild animals and the criteria against which their suitability to promote sustainable management has been assessed. Our concern, on the one hand, to enable the stakeholders to easily express their preferences and thus fully adhere to the decision-making process, and on the other hand, to respect the heterogeneous dimensions implied by sustainability led us to choose the KEmeny Median Indicator Ranks Accordance-Sort (KEMIRA-Sort) multi-criteria sorting method. The evaluation phase was guided by the consideration of decision-maker’s preferences for ranking criteria and empirical examples of assigning wild animals to ordered categories of suitability to sustainable management. The complete implementation of the decision-making process enabled us to identify the categories of wild animals according to their suitability to promote sustainable management in the case study of the Wédbila wildlife farm (WWF) in Burkina Faso. More specifically, we showed that the group of wild animals most likely to promote WWF sustainable management was made up of pork-spicy, aulacodes, and red-necked ostrich. These results obtained was in line with empirically estimation of the principle stakeholder playing the role of Decision maker. These relevant results obtained thus validate the effectiveness of the KEMIRA-Sort multi-criteria sorting method. In addition, the flexibility of the proposed approach predisposes it, subject to adaptation, to be used in other sustainable management wildlife farm contexts.

MCDM, Shorting Method, KEMIRA-Sort, Sustainable Management, Wildlife Farm