When wildlife damages crops, kills livestock or threatens people, the costs fall on some of the world’s poorest rural households, and the response can be deadly for animals. Human–wildlife conflict is one of the most important issues in conservation today, because the future of many large animals depends on whether people who live alongside them can tolerate them.
What you will learn
- What drives human–wildlife conflict
- Its costs for people and for wildlife
- Practical tools to prevent and reduce conflict
- Why social and economic approaches matter as much as technical ones
Why conflict happens
Conflict usually arises where wildlife and people share space and resources:
- Expanding farms and settlements into wildlife habitat and corridors.
- Recovering wildlife populations, such as elephants in parts of southern Africa, wolves in Europe and tigers in India and Nepal, moving into farmland.
- Crops and livestock that are easier and more nutritious targets than wild food.
- Drought and habitat loss that push animals out of protected areas.
- Habituation, when animals lose their fear of people, often because of food waste or feeding.
Many conflicts are also conflicts between people: between farmers and conservation agencies, between local communities and tourists, or over who controls land and benefits.
The costs
For people: lost crops and livestock, damaged property, injury and death, lost school and work time guarding fields at night, fear and stress. Elephants alone kill hundreds of people a year across Africa and Asia; in India, conflict with elephants causes around 500 human deaths a year according to government figures.
For wildlife: retaliatory killing by poisoning, snaring and shooting; removal of “problem animals”; and loss of local support for conservation. Retaliatory poisoning is a major threat to lions, hyenas and vultures in Africa and to snow leopards and wolves in Asia.
Solutions that work
Preventing damage
- Predator-proof livestock enclosures: reinforced, chain-link bomas or corrals keep lions, leopards, snow leopards and wolves away from livestock at night. Programmes by Lion Guardians and others in Kenya, and the Snow Leopard Conservancy in the Himalaya, have dramatically cut losses.
- Livestock guarding dogs, such as Anatolian shepherds used by the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia, reduce predation and therefore killing of cheetahs.
- Beehive fences: elephants avoid bees. Hives hung on wires around fields, developed by Lucy King and Save the Elephants in Kenya, deter crop-raiding elephants and produce honey for farmers.
- Chilli fences and chilli smoke, strong-smelling barriers that elephants dislike.
- Electric fences, effective when well built and maintained, but costly and potentially barriers to wildlife movement.
- Early-warning systems: SMS alerts, camera-trap networks and community “rapid response teams” warn villages when elephants approach.
- Better husbandry: herding livestock during the day, bringing animals in at night, and managing calving seasons.
- Waste management and bear-proof bins, which reduce conflicts with bears, baboons and monkeys.
Sharing costs and benefits
- Compensation schemes pay for verified losses. They help tolerance when payments are fair and quick, but can be slow, open to fraud and expensive.
- Insurance schemes and performance payments, which pay communities for successful breeding of predators on their land, such as the snow leopard programmes in the Himalaya and wolverine schemes in Sweden.
- Community conservancies and tourism revenue that give local people a direct stake in wildlife, as in Namibia and Kenya.
- Land-use planning that keeps corridors free of crops and settlements.
Understanding people
Tolerance depends not only on losses but on trust, fairness, culture and control. Programmes that involve communities in decisions, employ local people and respect local values tend to succeed; top-down approaches often fail.
Removing problem animals
Sometimes individual animals that repeatedly kill livestock or threaten people must be relocated or removed. Translocating predators often fails, because animals return or cause problems elsewhere. Clear, transparent protocols for “problem animals” build trust and prevent vigilante killing.
Case study: Lion Guardians
In the Amboseli ecosystem of Kenya, lions were being killed in retaliation for livestock losses and in traditional hunts. Since 2007, the Lion Guardians programme has employed young Maasai warriors, the group that traditionally hunted lions, as guardians. They track lions, warn herders, help recover lost livestock, reinforce bomas and stop retaliatory hunts. Studies in the area have reported fewer lion killings and a recovery in lion numbers, showing how employing and respecting local expertise can turn conflict into coexistence.
Try it yourself
Search for a news story about human–wildlife conflict in your country or region. Who is affected, what are the losses, and which solutions from this module could help? Which would be hardest to put in place, and why?
Key terms
- Human–wildlife conflict: negative interactions between people and wildlife.
- Retaliatory killing: killing wildlife in revenge for losses.
- Boma: an enclosure for livestock, especially in East Africa.
- Performance payment: payment linked to conservation outcomes such as predator breeding.
- Coexistence: a state in which people and wildlife share landscapes with acceptable risk.
Quick quiz
Further reading
- Frank, B., Glikman, J. A. and Marchini, S. (eds.) (2019). Human–Wildlife Interactions: Turning Conflict into Coexistence.
- King, L. E. et al. (2017). “Beehive fences as a multidimensional conflict-mitigation tool for farmers coexisting with elephants.” Conservation Biology.