Human-wildlife conflict occurs when animals pose a direct and recurring threat to the livelihood or safety of people, often leading to retaliation against the species involved. This retaliation commonly takes lethal form. Killing problems species can lead to conflicts with other species. In addition, conflicts with wildlife can spark conflicts between human groups about what should be done to remedy the situation. The issue becomes not just a conflict between humans and wildlife, but one between humans about wildlife. You could argue that the term human-animal conflict perpetuates the idea of antagonism between humans and other species. It frames conflict as inevitable. It might be better to simply talk about human-animal coexistence. We'll leave that debate aside. What we'll call human-animal conflict can take a number of forms. It can involve agricultural damage as when elephants raid crops or wild pigs damage fields. It can involve the killing of livestock by carnivores such as wolves, coyotes, or lions. It can involve environmental damage, such as when a prairie dog colony consumes the grass in a pasture, or when a beaver dam impedes water drainage. Human-wildlife conflict also encompasses property damage. In some parts of the world, elephants destroy homes, water tanks, and other structures. In other parts, rabbits can chew up ornamental plants. Human-wildlife conflict can also involve attacks on humans or companion animals by bears, crocodiles, sharks, snakes, and even by elephants. Finally, it can involve zoonotic disease or those transmitted from animals to humans. Environmental destruction can lead to an increase in zoonotic diseases, because a loss of habitat forces animals to move closer to urban areas, bringing diseases with them. Human-wildlife conflict can be caused by habitat loss or fragmentation and land use decisions in our increasingly crowded world, the loss of prey species can also put wildlife in conflict with humans as animals move into human spaces in search of food or compete with hunters. Conflicts can be consequences of natural disasters and all the causes are exacerbated by climate change. Here's an example of the complexity of human animal conflict and coexistence. The eradication and subsequent re-introduction of wolves in the United States. Although wolves had once lived throughout the country, they were persecuted and hunted to extinction by the 1930's. Wolfers, as the wolf hunters were known, killed dozens of wolves at a time for a bounty. Online, you can find historic photos of them surrounded by carcasses of wolves, either shot or poisoned with strychnine. The wolves were killed to protect livestock. After the American bison had all been slaughtered, the wolves killed sheep and cattle when they couldn't get elk or dear. This led to a war between ranchers and the wolves and ranchers won. By the 1930's, wolves had been eliminated, except for in a few places along the Canadian border. In 1973, the Endangered Species Act was signed into law. The next year, the wolf populations in the lower 48 states were listed as endangered. In 1995 and '96, an experimental population of 31 Canadian wolves were reintroduced to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which encompasses parts of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. Yellowstone was designated as a National Park in 1871, long before protections for wildlife existed. Park managers deliberately eliminated wolves and cougars by 1926. In the absence of apex predators and with hunting prohibited in the park, the Yellowstone elk populations grew unchecked to the point that they were altering the vegetation through overgrazing. In response, park managers implemented calls to keep the elk population from destroying its own habitat. The calls went down from 1934 to 1967, when opposition from animal rights activists and hunters led Congress to direct the Park Service to end it. Over the next 20 plus years, researchers explored restoring wolves to control the elk population. The reintroduction of the wolves had come after several years of debate with an opposition from the rural communities around the re-introduction site. Ranchers believed that the reintroduction of the wolves would mean the end of their livelihood. They saw it as an intrusion of the government and mostly urban environmentalist groups that had no sense of what life in the West was like. The status of wolves as endangered prohibits killing or harassing them or any species at risk for extinction, and ranchers resented being told they couldn't kill wolves to protect their livestock. The ranchers were also afraid that protections for wolves would lead to further prohibitions against hunting, snowmobiling and other activities that were part of their way of life. A conflict between humans and wildlife became a conflict between groups of humans. Was the reintroduction successful? Well, gray wolf populations are currently stable and healthy within nine states. The US Fish and Wildlife Service calls it one of the greatest comebacks for an animal in US conservation history. The wolf has been delisted or removed from the protection of the Endangered Species Act in many places and there's a proposal to delist them altogether. But the wolf populations only exist in about 20 percent of the wolf's original range. So some people question whether you can really call this a recovery. Biologists and wolf advocates worry that delisting them will lead to their extinction again. In much of the wolf's current territory, there's still a strong opposition, but there are also signs that people are willing to try to co-exist with these apex predators and not just kill them. In Idaho, for example, which is regarded as an anti wolf state overall, ranchers and conservationists are working together to protect sheep. The focus is not on killing wolves, but on preventing predation. The ranchers are using red plastic flags that flap on fences and frightened wolves. They're also using dogs, usually Great Pyrenees to guard the sheep. This shows that ranchers, livestock and wolves can live together. In other parts of the world, there are similar efforts. In parts of Africa where elephants regularly destroy crops, farmers have begun keeping beehives at the edges of their fields. Apparently elephants really dislike bees, and this discourages them from raiding the fields. The bees save the farmers crops and the elephants lives. In parts of India where people are at risk from attacks by tigers, they wear a mask on the back of their heads. Tigers prefer to attack from behind, so this evidently confuses them. Apparently some tigers wise up to the trick, so it might not be a long-term solution. The takeaway here is that encounters with wildlife are inevitable, but conflict is not necessarily so. Many of our encounters with wildlife are positive and beneficial. In cases of conflict, it's not only human health, safety, and welfare that's at risk, but also biodiversity and the health of the ecosystem. Because of human expansion into wildlife habitat, combined with climate change, human-wildlife interactions will increase. It will be increasingly important to focus on coexistence as well as conflict.
