People and Predators

From Conflict To Coexistence

Defenders of Wildlife, Nina Fascione, Aimee Delach, Martin Smith

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781559630849
  9781559630832
• eBook ISBN:
  9781597269100
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Zoology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Carnivores provide innumerable ecological benefits and play a unique role in preserving and maintaining ecosystem services and function, but at the same time they can create serious problems for human populations. A key question for conservation biologists and wildlife managers is how to manage the world's carnivore populations to conserve this important natural resource while mitigating harmful impacts on humans.

In People and Predators, leading scientists and researchers offer case studies of human-carnivore conflicts in a variety of landscapes, including rural, urban, and political. The book covers a diverse range of taxa, geographic regions, and conflict scenarios, with each chapter dealing with a specific facet of human-carnivore interactions and offering practical, concrete approaches to resolving the conflict under consideration. Chapters provide background on particular problems and describe how challenges have been met or what research or tools are still needed to resolve the conflicts.

People and Predators will helps readers to better understand issues of carnivore conservation in the 21st century, and provides practical tools for resolving many of the problems that stand between us and a future in which carnivores fulfill their historic ecological roles.

PART 1

Coexistence in Rural Landscapes

Humans are moving into previously undisturbed habitat at an ever–quickening rate, and thus conflicts with predators and disruptions of their prey base are on the rise. The increase in encounters coincides with a greater awareness by the general public of the ecological role that predators play in preserving healthy ecosystems and thus increases the demand that predators be protected and preserved. On the front line of this human–predator interface are the many rural residents who still make their livelihood from farming and ranching. These rural residents sometimes have to suffer the true economic burden of “living with carnivores” as they lose livestock to depredation.

Historically, carnivore management has meant simply shooting the predators until the “problem” was extirpated. This approach is no longer acceptable. Socially, the political power has shifted somewhat to the more urban society, whose members analyze the conflicts from afar and logically determine that preserving wolves or grizzly bears has intrinsic value. In addition, the maturing science of wildlife biology has begun to quantify the negative ramifications of not preserving the top predators within an ecosystem. And yet ranchers still need to make a living from the land. Modern wildlife managers understand both of these perspectives and strive to find solutions that will allow predators and ranchers to coexist. Part 1 of this book describes conflicts in rural landscapes in more detail and outlines several ways in which researchers and managers are striving to resolve the conflicts.

The chapters in Part 1 address the rural landscape, an area that is important regardless of where we live, because most of our food (crops and livestock) is grown there and most of our remaining natural areas are located there. Owing to their connection to the land, some rural residents have a keen sense of the ecological interrelationships within a functioning ecosystem, because without such knowledge crops fail and livestock perish. Some rural residents also work directly with animals on a daily basis, resulting in an added insight into many aspects of animal behavior. It is also in these rural regions that carnivores and humans first make contact and obviously where conflicts first occur. Therein lies the problem. The coexistence of humans with large predators is one of modern wildlife management’s most challenging undertakings and one that promises to become more difficult in the years ahead.

Chapter 1, “Minimizing Carnivore–Livestock Conflict: The Importance and Process of Research in the Search for Coexistence,” by Dr. Stewart Breck, explores the importance of research in the effort to develop solutions for conflicts between large carnivores and livestock. Dr. Breck explores a number of different research topics that will enhance our ability to predict and mitigate carnivore–livestock conflict.

Chapter 2, “Characteristics of Wolf Packs in Wisconsin: Identification of Traits Influencing Depredation,” is a collaboration by a group of agency, academic, and independent scientists led by Dr. Adrian Wydeven. In this chapter the authors follow the depredation trends of a naturally recovering wolf population and describe a case study from the state of Wisconsin that illustrates how managers and researchers might use predisposing factors to predict and avert wolf attacks on domestic animals.

Chapter 3, “Wolves in Rural Agricultural Areas of Western North America: Conflict and Conservation,” is by a group of scientists from academia and nongovernmental organizations, led by Dr. Marco Musiani of the University of Calgary. These researchers review wolf–livestock conflicts, and the recovery, conservation, and legal status of wolves, including compensation and depredation management for Alberta, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Understanding the factors that influence depredation allows us to consider alternative approaches for managing depredation risk while encouraging wolf conservation.

Together these chapters provide the reader with an insight into the complexity of coexisting with carnivores in the rural landscape. We make no attempt to present a complete representation of all the research and management projects underway throughout North America and, indeed, throughout the world. Rather, these chapters offer some idea of the breadth of research and management solutions being attempted in different areas of North America. The reader should also come away with a better understanding of how intensely the problem is felt by those humans who earn their livelihood from utilizing rural regions of the world. It is our hope that a mutual respect and tolerance will be developed by both rural and urban residents such that progress can continue to be made toward coexisting with carnivores.

CHAPTER 1

Minimizing Carnivore–Livestock Conflict: The Importance and Process of Research in the Search for Coexistence

Stewart W. Breck

Large carnivores that kill livestock can create both an economic and an emotional burden for producers. Because these acts of predation often result in deep disdain for large carnivores, and because humans who are in the profession of producing food have strong local and national political backing, finding solutions that minimize the number of livestock killed by large carnivores is a critical conservation priority. This is particularly true in areas throughout the world where the repatriation and protection of large carnivores is a priority. Unfortunately, our understanding of the biological and ecological factors that influence a carnivore’s decision to kill livestock, and of alternative methods for mitigating problems, is still nascent. Attaining solutions that minimize livestock losses while maintaining carnivore populations that are sustainable and ecologically relevant (Pyare and Berger 2003) will require reliable knowledge that only well–designed and well–executed research can provide.

In this chapter I explore the importance of research in the continued effort to develop better solutions for problems between large carnivores and livestock. I begin with a brief overview of research design to help nonscientists understand the terminology of the field. I then explore a number of different research topics, from causative factors in carnivore–livestock conflict to possible ways to reduce such conflict. Each research topic stresses varying needs, such as improving research design; broadening the scope of study to include large–carnivore behavior and ecology as these relate to livestock production; and addressing how environmental characteristics affect our management tools. These are difficult arenas for research because of the inherent problems in working with carnivores, the sociopolitical aspects of carnivore–livestock conflicts, and the large scale at which researchers must ask questions. In conclusion, I suggest ways to improve the scientific process by promoting better cooperation among stakeholders, more collaboration among scientists, and the use of adaptive management.

Research Design

Research may be defined as a purposeful endeavor to attain reliable knowledge—that is, information leading to a trustworthy understanding of a phenomenon, and/or which can be used to make good decisions regarding alteration of a system to achieve a desired outcome. Often these goals involve finding cause–and–effect relationships among variables (e.g., a scare device causes carnivore behavior to be altered). Trust in the reliability of results in large part depends on how well three elements of research design (control, randomization, and replication) are incorporated into the study.

The research design that offers the most opportunity to gain reliable knowledge regarding cause–and–effect relationships is the manipulative experiment. Manipulative experiments purposefully manipulate treatment units and compare them with unmanipulated control units, randomly selecting which units will act as treatment or control, and replicating the study either internally (replication within a study) or externally (replication of an entire study).

Unfortunately, manipulative experiments are extremely difficult to perform with large endangered carnivores. In particular, the lethal removal of individuals (a manipulation) is hard to justify because of ethical concerns and practical considerations regarding species recovery. Working at large spatial scales makes manipulative experiments more difficult for many reasons, including high cost (limiting the ability to replicate); logistical difficulty (limiting the ability to set up controls); and increased environmental variability (increasing the need for replication and control). Because of these and other difficulties, wildlife researchers often perform observational studies, which do not contain manipulations and often lack critical features of sound research design. Attaining reliable knowledge is possible with observational studies, but the process takes longer and is risky in the sense that unreliable information may be attained.

The challenge then is for researchers to maximize efficiency of learning and reliability of knowledge by creatively incorporating as many features of good research design as possible. Conceptually, a great deal of progress has been made along this front by promoting such ideas as adaptive management (“learning by doing”; MacNab 1983; Walters 1997) and metareplication (external replication; Johnson 2002), topics that will be covered in more detail toward the end of the chapter.

Understanding Carnivore–Livestock Conflicts

To develop effective solutions to carnivore–livestock conflicts we must understand why large carnivores attack livestock by discerning what aspects of the predators’ environment, biology, or ecology predispose them to do so. These questions require synthesizing knowledge of individual carnivore behavior, population dynamics of carnivores and their prey, and community ecology as they relate to the presence of livestock. Two research areas that begin to address these questions deal with the presence of “hot spots” and the existence of problem individuals.

Hot Spots: Why Do They Exist?

Recent studies of livestock losses to carnivores demonstrate the presence of hot spots, or small areas that have recurring attacks on livestock by carnivores (Fritts 1982; Cozza et al. 1996). For example, Stahl et al. (2001) studied lynx attacks on sheep in France and found that certain geographical areas, covering only 0.3—4.5% of the total area where attacks occurred, accounted for 33—69% of the attacks. It is unclear how ubiquitous hot spots are across carnivore species and across different ranges, and it is not clear what causes hot spots, but a better understanding of this phenomenon may be important for more effective management. A number of factors are hypothesized for causing hot spots, including individual problem predators, herding techniques, the abundance and availability of wild and domestic prey, habitat characteristics, and the abundance of predators.

Research regarding hot spots should first focus on determining their prevalence and distribution for various carnivore species in a diversity of areas. Important data are spatial location of available livestock, number of kills in particular areas, spatial location of kills, and species of carnivore responsible for kills. Attaining such data requires the skill of trained experts who are able to determine the difference between animals killed or scavenged, and to distinguish species responsible for kills. Simultaneously, personnel should collect information on site–specific characteristics (e.g., proximity to dwellings); husbandry practices (e.g., presence or absence of guard animals and methods of carcass di...

Table of contents

• About Island Press
• About Defenders of Wildlife,
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART 1 - Coexistence in Rural Landscapes
• PART 2 - Coexistence in Developer Landscapes
• PART 3 - Coexistence in Political Landscapes
• Conclusion
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index
• Island Press Board of Directors