Human–wildlife coexistence: attitudes and behavioural intentions towards predators in the Maasai Mara, Kenya
FEMK E BROEK H U I S,MIC HAEL KAEL O DOMIN IC KANTA I S AK A T and NICHOLAS B. E LL IO T
Abstract Living alongside predators can entail substantial costs both in terms of livelihoods and personal safety. Negative interactions with predators can lead to negative attitudes and behavioural intentions such as retaliatory or pre-emptive killing. As a result, conservation strategies are increasingly adopting human–wildlife coexistence ap- proaches aimed at minimizing the costs associated with liv- ing with predators by providing direct or indirect benefits. This is done in the hope that people will foster positive atti- tudes and behavioural intentions towards predators. However, people’s attitudes and their behavioural intentions are not necessarily linked, and both need to be understood for conservation actions to be effective. We conducted 747 semi-structured interviews with community members in the Maasai Mara, Kenya, to determine which factors influ- enced people’s attitudes and behavioural intentions towards predators and whether the two were linked. Most intervie- wees (57.52%) had a positive attitude towards predators as measured by their assertion that people, livestock and pre- dators should coexist. Their attitude was dependent on ben- efits, occupation, conservancy membership and perceived community ownership of predators, but was not influenced by the costs of livestock depredation. Most respondents who were members of a conservancy had positive attitudes to- wards predators but this differed by conservancy, suggesting that, in addition to benefits, conservation politics could in- fluence attitudes. In total, 10.3% of respondents said that they would kill a predator if it killed their livestock. This be- havioural intention was only influenced by the respondent’s attitude. Understanding the factors that influence attitudes and behavioural intentions will aid future management and coexistence strategies.
Keywords Attitude, behavioural intention, benefits, costs, human–wildlife coexistence,Maasai Mara, predator, tolerance
FEMKE BROEKHUIS† (Corresponding author), MICHAEL KAELO* and DOMINIC KANTAI SAKAT* Mara Cheetah Project, Kenya Wildlife Trust, P.O. Box 86, 00502 Karen, Nairobi, Kenya. E-mail
femke.broekhuis@
gmail.com
NICHOLAS B. ELLIOT† Mara Lion Project, Kenya Wildlife Trust, Nairobi, Kenya
*Also at: Mara Lion Project, Kenya Wildlife Trust, Nairobi, Kenya †Also at: Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, The Recanati-Kaplan Centre, Tubney House, Tubney,UK
Received 14 August 2017. Revision requested 23 November 2017. Accepted 12 January 2018. First published online 27 July 2018.
Supplementary material for this article is available at
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0030605318000091
Introduction
of life (Thirgood et al., 2005; Inskip & Zimmermann, 2009; Acha et al., 2018). These costs can often lead to nega- tive attitudes (Kansky & Knight, 2014) or negative beha- viours towards predators (Inskip & Zimmermann, 2009; Marchini &Macdonald, 2012). Negative behaviours can in- clude the retaliatory or pre-emptive killing of predators (e.g. Loveridge et al., 2017) and it is believed that this has resulted in the decline or local extirpation of many carnivore popu- lations (Treves & Karanth, 2003). Although attitudes can be a useful predictor of behavioural intentions (Kraus, 1995) this is not necessarily the case as the Theory of Planned Behaviour predicts that behavioural intentions can also be influenced by subjective norms and perceived behavioural control (Ajzen, 1991; Fishbein & Ajzen, 2011). Hence it is possible that the underlying determinants of attitudes and behavioural intentions differ (Liu et al., 2011; Harvey et al., 2017). Therefore, understanding the factors that influence both attitudes and behavioural intentions towards wildlife, independent of each other, is essential in informing conser- vation interventions (Manfredo, 2009; Harvey et al., 2017). As negative interactions with predators are often consid-
L
ered to be the root cause of negative attitudes and beha- viours towards predators (Madden & McQuinn, 2014), minimizing these negative interactions has become central to conservation efforts (Eklund et al., 2017). Minimizing these negative interactions can broadly be achieved through exclusion or coexistence strategies. Exclusion strategies rely on humans and wildlife being separated through, for ex- ample, the erection of physical barriers such as fences (e.g. Massey et al., 2014), the removal of wildlife from anthropo- genic landscapes (e.g. Treves & Karanth, 2003), the removal of people from wildlife areas (e.g. Karanth, 2007) or a com- bination of these. However, exclusion policies can lead to negative attitudes towards conservation (e.g. Ite, 1996) and could have significant ecological consequences. Fencing, for example, is a particularly contentious issue (Creel et al., 2013; Packer et al., 2013a, b) as it leads to habitat
Oryx, 2020, 54(3), 366–374 © 2018 Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605318000091
iving alongside predators can inflict substantial costs on local communities through loss of livelihoods and risk
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