204 M. A. Kichloo et al. The wide array of habitats across the landscape supports


a large population of carnivores and their prey base. The major carnivores in the region, apart from the common leopard, include the snow leopard Panthera uncia, Asiatic black bear Ursus thibetanus and Himalayan brown bear Ursus arctos isbellinus. The main prey species include the Himalayan goral Naemorhedus goral, Himalayan musk deer Moschus leucogaster, Himalayan ibex Capra sibirica, hangul Cervus hanglu hanglu, various smaller animals and numerous species of Galliformes (Hilaluddin & Naqash, 2013). Agriculture and livestock herding are the primary sources of income for the majority of the population in the area. The Bakerwals inhabit the National Park along with their large herds of sheep, goats, cows and horses that graze along the forest edges and meadows through the summer (April–September).


Methods


Sampling design We conducted questionnaire-based interviews with select members of local communities and Bakerwals over a 2-year time period, during 2017–2019. The questionnaire (following Oli et al., 1994; Supplementary Material 1), com- prised three parts: (1) socio-demographic data (name, age, gender, occupation and community) and respondent knowledge of wildlife, (2) details regarding livestock depre- dation as well as the practices used to mitigate such preda- tion, and (3) data regarding people’s perceptions towards carnivores on a five-point Likert scale (strong like, slight like, indifferent, slight dislike and strong dislike). We approached the respondents and introduced ourselves as students conducting a study on human–wildlife inter- actions in the National Park and its surroundings. We included in the study only those individuals who could correctly identify the common leopard from a series of pictures of different wild animals. Before the start of each interview, we obtained informed verbal consent from each respondent and we kept their identity confidential. To faciliate communication with respondents in their local language, the interviewing team was often accompanied by local people who were knowledgeable about wildlife, and by staff from the local wildlife department. We con- ducted the interviews (lasting a mean of 6 min) in local languages including Kashmiri, Gojri and Urdu. We pro- vided no financial incentives or monetary benefits to the respondents who participated in the survey.


Data analysis


We used descriptive statistics to analyse data on livestock mortality and depredation patterns. We examined the rela- tionship between livestock holdings, predation control


practices and respondent attitudes towards these practices using Spearman’s correlation. We measured the predation control practices as ranks and considered the Likert score to be an ordinal variable. For each predation control practice, we computed the correlation coefficient and related P-value with livestock holdings and Likert score as dependent variables, whereby livestock holdings equalled animal counts. We used an ordinal logistic regression to determine the key factors (e.g. age, gender, occupation, region, activity duration and livestock holdings) that in- fluence the attitudes of people towards leopards. We per- formed all statistical and graphical analysis in R 4.1.1 (R Core Team, 2022). Wecarried out the regression analysis using the clm function in the ordinal package in R (Chris- tensen, 2022), and assessed the overall measure of model fit using the function anova. We calculated pseudo-R2 values to test the goodness of model fit using the function nagerkerke from the package rcompanion (Mangiafico, 2023). We calculated the statistical significance of the live- stock holdings for the groups of respondents who had and had not experienced livestock depredation using a Mann– Whitney U test after we had checked the samples for nor- mality using a Shapiro–Wilk test. We used a rank biserial correlation to calculate the effect size of the results using the function rank_biserial from the package effectsize (Ben-Shachar et al., 2020).


Results


Weinterviewed 102 respondents (98 men, 4 women) in vari- ous villages/locations in the Dachan and Marwah regions of the National Park. Most of the respondents (52%) were aged 46–65 years, with a mean age of 49.7 years (Table 1). The principal occupation of the majority of the respondents was livestock rearing (52%) followed by agriculture/small landholders (32%) and government employees (forest and wildlife officials; 10%), and 6% of respondents practiced mixed occupations. Most of the interviewees were long- time users of the Park, and the mean activity period of re- spondents (i.e. the number of years during which they had visited the Park regularly) was 30.5 years (Table 1). Many of the respondents (42%) had visited the Park on a regu- lar basis for more than 30 years, followed by those with ac- tivity periods of 21–30 years (25%) and 10–20 years (31%). Only two respondents (2%) had regularly accessed the Park for less than 10 years. Of the total 102 respondents, 68 reported mixed livestock


holdings comprising sheep, goat, cows, oxen and horses. Amongst these, 43 respondents reported livestock predation by leopards on 71 separate occasions over a span of 2 years (during 2017–2019). Participants from the Rinae valley reported the highest number of depredation cases (30), followed by those from the Kiyar (22), Kibber (15) and


Oryx, 2024, 58(2), 202–209 © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605323001278


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140