To kill or not to kill?: factors related to people’s support of lethal and non-lethal strategies for managing monkeys in India

ABSTRACT

People use many kinds of mitigation strategies to resolve human-wildlife conflict issues, and their preferences for lethal or non-lethal techniques are influenced by socio-cultural factors and their attitudes toward the conflict species. We conducted studies in two regions in India to investigate factors related to people’s choice of conflict mitigation strategies against commensal monkey species. We conducted qualitative and quantitative, face-to-face interviews to collect data and analyzed the relationships among socio-demographic variables, strategies used, and duration of conflict. Respondents’ choice of mitigation strategies was related to their religion, education, and conflict history, but not occupation. A small percentage of respondents recommended monkey culling as a mitigation strategy, but the majority preferred that government authorities use translocation or sterilization as a mitigation measure. A deeper understanding of socio-cultural beliefs and traditions at regional levels is necessary before mitigation strategies are instituted in a generalized manner against conflict wildlife.

KEYWORDS:

• Human-wildlife conflict
• lethal control
• India
• religion
• education
• conflict duration
• multidimensional scaling

Acknowledgments

We thank Arjun CP, Shaurabh Anand, Joshua Miller, Shalean Collins, and Roshni Binoy for their assistance with the study. We are grateful to the forest department personnel in Kerala and Rajasthan for their assistance in the field, particularly Ranjith Bhaskaran, Anil Kumar, Basheer Ahamed, G.S. Bhardwaj, and Dharmendra Khandal. We are very thankful to the two reviewers and the Associate Editor in particular whose comments helped to considerably improve the quality of the manuscript.

Author Contributions

Study concept: SR; creation of the survey and translations into Hindi and Malayalam: SR, BVV, PAP, RG; planning of the field-work: SR and PAP; contribution to field work: RG; writing of the manuscript: PAP and SR; contribution to data analyses PAP and MB; revision of final version: all authors.

Ethical Standards

The study protocol and questionnaire survey were approved by the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) Research Ethics Committee.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Science and Technology, GoI [SERB/F/10032/2016-17].