(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).
