Human Safety around Large Carnivores

(Loveman, 2011)

          When living with large carnivores, it is likely there will be negative interactions. Attacks by large carnivores on people can increase resistance to conservation efforts. However, large carnivores need these heavy conservation efforts because their numbers are still declining. They are still dwindling because they are threatened by hunting, depletion of wild prey, habitat destruction, degradation, and fragmentation (Loë and Röskaft 2004). In addition, humans that experience negative interactions or have negative attitudes towards large carnivores make it more difficult to conserve them.  For example, when a human or domestic animal is killed by a large carnivore, they demand lethal consequences for that animal.  Is there any hope to conserving large carnivores alongside humans?  There are objectives to consider to balance carnivore and human satisfaction.

            Even with legislation in place such as the Endangered Species Act, large carnivore abundance decreases.  Further management ideas, such as reintroduction of species, appears successful in some areas.  An Important foundation for reintroduction includes ensuring there is a low level of human conflict with large carnivores (Loë and Röskaft 2004).  This proves difficult in multi-use landscapes where humans and carnivores live.  The difficult tasks that conservation administrations face include: forming successful multi-use management plans, decreasing loss of livestock to large carnivores, analyzing predator-prey relationships to see how man and carnivore compete for game, stopping illegal hunting, establishing functional education programs to reduce fear and resistance to large carnivore conservation, and finally successfully appeasing human safety concerns (Loë and Röskaft 2004).

            Human safety is of course compromised when there is an injury or death due to a conflict with a large carnivore.  These instances add to historical negative attitudes towards these animals, along with lethal responses to the predator.  Large carnivores tend to be killed if they attack and fatally injure a human.  In addition, some responses result in hunting-campaigns with the outcome of killing many innocent carnivores.  Some attacks can be prevented by the behavior of the human towards an aggressive carnivore.  In order to minimize attacks and create positive attitudes toward these predators requires close observations of attack situations.  This way, human safety concerns get addressed while the large carnivore gets conservation management.

Large carnivores will always be a threat to humans and will continue to be as human populations grow and carnivores coexist in the same.   Löe and Eivin Röskaft in 2004 gathered data on carnivore attacks on humans from databases all over the world such as British Government of India, Ugandan Game Department, and others.  This data goes back a century and includes accounts from multiple families of carnivores.  However, this data only includes numbers, not the specifics involved with the fatal attack, per the High Commissioner of India in regards to tiger attacks.  For example, socioeconomic factors may influence variability in statistics such as in urban areas where people hike in bear habitat, or rural societies in Asia and Africa, where there are high rates of attacks due to daily domestic activities.    Löe (2004) found that more than 90% of the recorded large carnivore attacks on humans occurred in Asia and Africa between 1950 and 2000.

            How can there be balance between human and carnivore satisfaction.  Scientists have the data and know that big cats, mainly tigers, wolves, and bears are likely responsible for more numerous fatalities.  Next research needs to be done to understand the reasons behind the numbers, not assume the problem lies in the animal.  For example, from table 1, tigers have estimated to have killed over 12 thousand people in a century.  H. Hendrich in his paper , “The status of the tiger…” in 1975,  suggested that environmental differences may be involved in the stark variability in attacks. He hypothesized that the high rate of attacks on humans in Sunderban, Bangladesh, by the Bengal tiger (P. t. tigris) compared to most other areas was due to lack of available fresh water, a hypothesis not yet tested.  S. Herrero in his 1985 paper, Bear Attacks, analyzed brown bear (Ursus arctos) and American black bear (U. americanus) attacks in North America. He discovered they make two general modes of attack. “Defensive attacks” may occur when the bear is stressed and feels threatened, usually when suddenly encountering a person. “Offensive attacks” occur when a bear wants something such as food or space, or in abnormal instances, human prey. Herrero noted humans behaved benignly when encountering an aggressive bear, likely because they did not understand the bear’s behavior.

            Löe and Eivin Röskaft propose a solution to understanding carnivore attacks for future research, allowing the ability to create management plans for large, potentially dangerous carnivores.  Databases that record attacks should be uniform and agree on the specific information needed about attack (Löe and Röskaft 2004).  The differences in attack databases result from disagreement regarding what information is necessary.  For example, in table 2, five databases contain information on human behavior during an encounter while Nevada’s Report Form on Interactions with Mountain Lions and the Californian Wildlife Incident Report Form record narrative, descriptive information.

           The number of carnivore attacks is really unknown, and information on how to avoid attacks is even scarcer.  Two solution suggested by Loë and Röskaft include of course getting rid of the chance of encounters and also teach people to behave in a way so that an encounter does not turn into an attack.  Management plans that include protected areas and removing problem animals are helpful but people should know how to protect themselves by having knowledge of protective behavioral techniques.  This is because large problem animals such as tigers, wolves, and bears are in multi-use populated areas and these encounters are expected to increase as human population increases.  Present knowledge often is unsatisfactory to draw conclusions about the occurrence and cause of attacks (Loë and Röskaft 2004)  Loë and Röskaft suggest that formal information systems that include database(s) covering attacks and encounters should be implemented in large carnivore conservation, to be able to respond to future requests for information. Establishing a central organization to gather and disperse all information on large carnivore attacks might be an effective way of achieving this (Loë and Röskaft 2004).