Image source: File:Canis lupus. 2021. El Paso, CO, US. Robert McCabe (1) (52582886470).jpg - Wikimedia Commons
Wolf populations are increasing across Europe, to the displeasure of some stakeholders. How can conservationists work to achieve co-existence?
In recent decades, large carnivores have been the subject of increasing conservation interests in Europe and North America. The increasing abandonment of rural land as people move to urban ‘cores’, along with initiatives like rewilding and reforestation, have allowed carnivores to recolonise vast swathes of land, or, in places where they already existed, to increase their numbers.
One of the predominant reasons for this conflict is the tendency of carnivores to prey on livestock. Another is their need for a large home range. Humans and carnivores therefore end up competing for land and food, and this rivalry can often end in humans intentionally killing carnivores - jeopardising the success of conservation initiatives.
It may be instinctual for wildlife biologists or environmentalists to hold these hostile members of the public in contempt - after all, the killing of large carnivores is contrary to our passion for wildlife and ecosystem recovery, and to many of us, also a matter of animal welfare. But this disregards human welfare, and the genuine complexities of human-wildlife conflict. Farmers - the classic ‘enemy’ of conservationists - are particularly vulnerable to mental health issues, due to a range of factors including the effects of climate change and shocks to the market such as COVID-19 or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In the Cantabrian mountains in northwestern Spain, people have historically depended on livestock for both subsistence and income. Recently, they have started to face the loss of young people to cities, and the realities of an ageing population.
This depopulation has facilitated the return of the ‘wild’ - specifically, wolves and brown bears. The brown bear is considered Critically Endangered in the region and afforded full protection. Despite the grey wolf being considered ‘near threatened’ in the area, wolves are subjected to annual culling measures, and in many places, are also both legally hunted and illegally poached.
When local farmers were interviewed by researchers, many of them concurred that wolves belonged to the area as a part of nature, but the majority did not see the need to conserve them. They spoke of the economic and emotional burden of livestock losses to wolf predation, with some having even abandoned the keeping of livestock because of this.
But more than this, wolves to them represented the broader problems of the region - a landscape where people no longer felt it was worth living. The return of the ‘wild’ had benefited the wolves, but what about the humans left behind?
Ultimately, people’s views varied by the region surveyed. This variation can be attributed to both the number of wolves (and consequently, the number of predations) but also the methods of management. In Léon, for example, wolf numbers were lower, and the approach to wolf management a lot more decentralised than in other regions. This produced the strange combination of a more positive view of the wolf amongst locals … and an extremely relaxed viewpoint around killing them.
This contradiction, the researchers believed, was down to the sense of autonomy - being given the freedom to kill the wolves meant people resented them less. In places where management of carnivores is highly centralised, livestock owners often express frustration at their lack of voice within the system - in Finland, for example, where reindeer-herding is a traditionally Sámi (indigenous) occupation, the large carnivore issue has been used to push communities further into marginalisation.
The researchers found similar frustrations in Somiedo, where governance methods sat at the opposite end of the spectrum to Léon. In Somiedo, only park rangers were allowed to kill wolves, and a combination of a top-down management regime and heavy policing had resulted in far less illegal poaching than in Léon, but the attitudes towards wolves were far more negative. The disciplinary interventions had worked - but also created a culture of fear, and one where people openly criticised the regime they lived under.
What about economic interventions? Compensation for livestock losses, the researchers found, seemed to have no impact on the differences in attitudes between regions in the Cantabrian Mountains. This matches with other studies such as in Wisconsin, where farmers stressed that compensation felt inadequate when considering the emotional impact of witnessing livestock losses.
Some of the attempts to commodify the wolves had actually backfired. In Riaño, nearby to Léon, residents felt that wolf-tourism showcased a romanticised version of the wilderness, and disliked that the region had become dependent on hunting revenue - which they also claimed was not distributed evenly. In their view, wolves were a higher cost than a benefit to the local economy. Even in Léon, the issuing of hunters’ permits had provided a source of conflict, as people felt that the licences were increasingly being issued to wealthy foreigners as opposed to local citizens.
What can we learn from this study? Perhaps that the ideal situation is one where you maintain viable large carnivore populations whilst allowing political autonomy and self-governance amongst the people co-existing with them. Both Somiedo and Léon had one, but not the other: establishing bottom-up governance in Léon had succeeded in making the locals happy, but ‘failed’ in terms of wolf conservation due to unsustainable numbers being killed, whilst high wolf numbers and low poaching rates were achieved in Somiedo, but the people there were resentful.
How do we achieve the two together? I believe the solution is to focus our attention towards cultural shifts rather than relying on top-down institutions or on market forces which have heretofore failed in achieving co-existence. The surveys across the Cantabrian mountains perfectly exemplify the flaws in simple economic or legal ‘fixes,’ and the necessity instead for long-term attitude change and decentralised governance.
There is an increasing argument for the need to incorporate cultural lenses into conservation - historically missing from what has been “an endeavour rooted in the values, perceptions, and methods of Western conservation science and culture.” Applying a one-size-fits-all approach such as economic compensation may provide short-term benefits, but does not guarantee co-existence.
More than viewing these people as threats to conservation, or even just reducing them to “stakeholders” to negotiate with, conservationists need to foster appropriate dialogue and exchange of knowledge, as well as establishing the capacity for local decision-making and stewardship, rather than outsourcing this to the market or the state.
Establishing bottom-up governance in Léon succeeded in making the locals happy, but ‘failed’ in terms of wolf conservation due to unsustainable numbers being killed. To move towards a happy medium is a challenging endeavour, however, given the influences of socio-economic and cultural factors (mostly) beyond the control of conservationists making it hard to alter perceptions of and interactions with wolves.
Human-wolf relationships in Kyrgyzstan exemplify the interdisciplinary nature of the problem. After the collapse of the USSR, villagers facing economic insecurity in the transition to a market economy began to depend on livestock as a source of capital. The view of wolves - which had previously been seen as “intelligent, conscious and even useful animals” dramatically shifted, as Kyrgz villagers began to see the wolf as oppressive and invasive. This highlights how geopolitical forces have the power to drastically alter local ecologies. No wonder conservation has been labelled a ‘wicked problem’!
In the case of the Cantabrian Mountains, villagers’ perceptions of wolves also depend on cultural context. In 2016, researchers found that the quantity of wolves culled in Asturias was positively linked to the number of negative articles run by the local news site, La Nueva España, rather than a result of actual economic damages by wolves. The media coverage was also not correlated to the amount of economic damages, (and although wolf damages were only five-fold higher than bear damages, wolves received 30 times as much coverage) suggesting that the media has the power to reify public dislike of wolves and influence management decisions.
Unpicking all of this is certainly a challenge, but a challenge that starts with dialogue and outreach. Research has suggested that conservation initiatives are less accurate when they rely on ‘expert’ opinion, as the act of developing expertise may lead to “entrained thinking” and lack of open-mindedness, and that successful conservation initiatives tend to incorporate a more inclusive definition of expertise. When conservation professionals were surveyed in 2020, the consensus among them was that large carnivore management should be achieved through a cross-exchange of local decision-making and technical opinion, however, less than half agreed that locals co-existing with carnivores or the general public had an ‘accurate perspective.’
If the conservation of carnivores is to succeed, the general public must confront the realities of carnivore conservation and embrace co-existence. But in order to achieve this, conservationists need to stop dismissing their concerns and put them into the broader context of the world we live in - and this harmony will never truly be realised through top-down bureaucratic structures.