Green Blog: Live and Let Live: Humans and Tigers

In an increasingly crowded world, wildlife conservation often requires that humans share space with large carnivores. But living alongside potentially deadly 670-pound tigers poses its challenges, and the tigers must similarly contend with human disturbances. Two new studies suggest that it is possible to find an equilibrium, however.

?If you have animals and people living on top of each other, there?s a constant threat of conflict,? said Neil Carter, a doctoral candidate in systems integration and sustainability at Michigan State University. ?Seeing both sides of the coin is really the only way to identify conservation actions that are able to help both people and animals thrive.?

With that goal in mind, Mr. Carter set off for Chitwan National Park in Nepal, a popular tourist destination that is home to around 125 adult tigers and is surrounded by a forested buffer zone where 560,000 people, mostly farmers, live. On occasion the tigers pick off livestock, and 65 people lost their lives to tiger attacks between 1998 and 2006. While the government provides some compensation for livestock losses, some tigers have been poisoned to death by locals who resent the predation.

Mr. Carter took a survey of around 500 individuals living within a mile of the national park, asking questions like ?Does it please you just knowing that tigers exist in the nearby forests?? and ?How worried are you that tigers will attack you or someone in your family??

He also asked people whether they preferred that the tiger populations increase, decline or remain the same.

Writing in the journal Oryx, Mr. Carter and his colleagues reported that nearly 20 percent of the people surveyed said that tigers had attacked their livestock or threatened them directly, and around 40 percent viewed tigers as a nuisance.

Still, the interviewees were evenly divided between those wishing that there were fewer tigers and those hoping that the forest population would increase. Most of those in favor of more tigers associated the animals with tourism and thus with enhanced revenue. Other people valued tigers because of their Hindu belief system or as an icon of national heritage.

Yet only a few people recognized that tigers perform an ecological service by keeping populations of large crop-raiding herbivores in check. ?Crop raiding causes a bigger economic impact on locals than tigers killing livestock,? Mr. Carter said. Without the tigers, herbivore populations would likely explode, he pointed out, yet of all the values people assigned to tigers, keeping the forest ?healthy? ranked lowest.

Creating educational programs to highlight this service might encourage people to view the tigers in a more positive light, Mr. Carter said.

Among those who associated tigers only with negative impacts, he found that those feelings were driven more by pragmatic concerns than by fear. Building effective cattle sheds and protective fences and increasing government aid to those who lose livestock could alleviate those misgivings, he wrote.

Mr. Carter and his colleagues also set up motion-activated cameras in nearly 80 places around the community and in the forest forest, including footpaths and roads, to figure out what habitat humans and tiger share. During the day, the researchers watched as humans and vehicles traversed the trails. At night, tigers silently padded by the same locations.

?People and tigers are sharing the same space by using it at different times of the day,? Mr. Carter said. ?That speaks to tigers? capacity to adapt.?

In places where tigers live but humans are scarcer, the animals tend to prowl throughout the day and night. Chitwan tigers were one-sixth less active during the day by comparison with tigers in Indonesia and Malaysia, for example, the researchers point out in a second paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They suggested that this might be because Nepalese locals frequently wander into the forest to chop wood.

Over all, Mr. Carter said, the studies show that large species of wildlife can share the same space as human populations. Studies in other locations where tigers and humans occupy the same space are needed to confirm whether or not this is a universal trend, however, he added.

?Finding something interesting like this in Nepal is exciting,? Mr. Carter said. ?We should try to identify which policies are working from this case study and potentially duplicate it elsewhere.?

From lions and leopards in Africa to cougars, wolves and bears in the United States, he added, more study is needed on human tolerance for carnivorous wildlife and how the animals respond in turn.

Source: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/live-and-let-live-humans-and-tigers/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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