Food waste and sloth bears in India 701 Residents’ attitudes towards bears
We assessed residents’ attitudes towards sloth bears and their understanding of bear ecology using a semi-structured ques- tionnaire with a combination of closed and open-ended questions (Supplementary Material 1). We first tested the questionnaire with 25 people to identify ambiguous or lead- ing questions, especially when rendered in the locally spo- ken languages of Hindi or Rajasthani, and removed ormodi- fied any problematic questions. Respondents completing the questionnaire during the test phase were not included in subsequent interviews. We measured attitudes towards sloth bears by scoring six questions framed to determine residents’ attitudes towards bears in their area,with scores being favour-
able (+1), neutral (0)ornegative(−1) for each question.We measured attitudes as a composite of six questions rather than one direct question because Rajasthanis generally have strongly positive attitudes towards wildlife because of reli- gious beliefs and social norms (Karanth et al., 2019), and an- swers to a single question would probably be biased towards existing norms. We reduced confirmation and acquiescence bias by having an equal number of positive and reverse ques- tions and eliminated carelessness bias by administering questionnaires in person (Weijters et al., 2013; Suárez-Alvarez et al., 2018). Open-ended questions addressed residents’ per- sonal experiences with bears, limited to those that took place within the last 2 years, to minimize recall errors. We asked about the locations, timeof day, andnumberof bears encoun- tered, and locations of known attacks on people. We deter- mined the geographical coordinates of all attack locations using a GPS. Questions also assessed respondents’ percep- tions of bear ecology.We asked about respondents’ thoughts on the principal reason bears enter Mount Abu, what bears forage for, and why bears attack people.We recorded the re- spondents’ age, gender, education status (six categories), and occupation (nine categories), to examine whether attitudes towards sloth bears were influenced by these factors.
Secondary data on bear attacks
To verify respondents’ views of trends in sloth bear attacks, we collated cases of bear attacks on people documented by the Forest Department, Government of Rajasthan, and results from an online search using the phrases ‘Mount Abu’, ‘sloth bear’, and ‘attack’. We excluded social media content with poor verifiability of location and date. Using a GPS, we obtained geographical coordinates of Forest Department records for mapping.
Influence of land-cover variables on sloth bear sightings
Sloth bear presence is influenced by multiple variables including availability of food and water, and vegetation
cover (Dharaiya et al., 2016). In addition, within a town, we presumed that bear movement was limited by built-up areas but facilitated by roads. We therefore measured built-up area (m2), vegetation cover (m2), road length (m), and open water availability (m2) in each grid cell using the most recent images on GoogleEarth Pro 7.3.2 (Google, Mountain View, USA). Because responses during the trial questionnaire suggested that sloth bears visit rubbish bins for food,we also mapped all rubbish
bins.Variance inflation factors for all variables were ,4 (range 1.09–3.71), suggest- ing that levels of autocorrelation were acceptable, and we modelled untransformed variable measures against pooled bear sightings at the grid cell level.
Statistical analyses
We totalled the number of respondents providing answers to questions relating to experiences with bears, timeof daywhen experiences occurred, primary reasons why respondents be- lieved bearswere enteringMountAbu, andwhy they thought bears attack people. We visualized these as descriptive bar graphs. We determined the geographical locations of all in- stances of bear sightings, using aGPS (n = 217), and generated a heat map using QGIS 2.12.0 (QGIS Development Team, 2012) of the number of bears sighted, to examine the spatial distribution of bear presence in Mount Abu. We also in- cluded locations of rubbish bins on this map. For each respondent, we calculated the mean attitude score, which varied between +1 (entirely positive attitude to-
wards bears) and −1 (completely negative attitude towards bears). We used recursive partitioning to examine which factors (age, gender, education status, occupation) influ- enced residents’ attitudes towards bears. Recursive parti- tioning uses classification and regression trees to create binary decision trees that identify variables most important in determining the outcome of a choice (Strobl et al., 2009). We first generated a classification tree with all variables using the rpart package in R 3.6.1 (Therneau & Atkinson, 2019) to assess contributions of all variables to the measured attitudes. The resulting models were complex (Supplemen- tary Figs 1 & 2), and we identified significant variables (P,0.05) by generating a non-parametric conditional in- ference tree via recursive partitioning with the R package party (Hothorn et al., 2019) for final interpretation. We summed bear attack information from secondary
sources and compared these data with information obtained from the residents of Mount Abu. We also included infor- mation from the city municipality on the number of vehicles entering the city annually, to visualize the scale of tourism. A Fisher’s exact test of the number of seasonal attacks, pro- vided separately by the Forest Department of Rajasthan, showed that the two data sources had similar inter-seasonal variation (P = 0.42). To assess whether bear attacks had a
Oryx, 2021, 55(5), 699–707 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605320000216
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