Abstract

Conservation professionals are becoming more proactive in collaborating with local communities when developing strategies for coexisting with predators. Nevertheless, community perceptions are often still ignored including the social dynamics underlying residents’ relationships with predator species and people’s attitudes towards solutions that are suggested within conservation interventions. The effectiveness of interventions to mitigate or eliminate conflict are highly dependent on the context of the conflict, the landscape and communities involved as well as species behavior. The problems of human-predator conflict continue to persist and farmers and pastoralists in all regions are losing increasing numbers of livestock to felids, bears and canids. The support of such communities is a vital element in the success of conservation. Similarly, the belief that communities have in the efficacy of solutions implemented by conservation programs is important for sustained reduction of conflict. Perceived effectiveness is a subjective measure that is influenced by social norms and is often overlooked in human-wildlife interaction studies but is crucial to understand to ensure the method will be used long-term.

Keywords

human wildlife conflict, carnivore, theory of planned behavior, conflict, compensation, non-lethal deterrent, coexisted, millennia, reduce predation, retaliatory killings, Atlantic forest, congruent, local attitudes, predator control, predator population, non-lethal controls