Elsevier

Biological Conservation

Volume 224, August 2018, Pages 230-237
Biological Conservation

Mind over matter: Perceptions behind the impact of jaguars on human livelihoods

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2018.06.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Material loss is not the only predictor of perceived jaguar impact on livelihoods.

  • Attitudes and knowledge regarding jaguars interact to determine perceived impact.

  • When knowledge is low, negative attitudes determine greater perceptions of impact.

  • Attitude and knowledge are influenced by age, gender, wealth and place of residence.

  • The conflict is shaped by experience but also by what is heard from other people.

Abstract

In an investigation of perceptions of the conflicts between people and jaguars on the Amazon deforestation frontier and Pantanal, Brazil, we explored how perceptions of the impact of jaguars on livestock and on human safety vary with experience of jaguars (including reported livestock loss), region, place of residence, attitudes towards jaguars, knowledge of the species, and perceptions of changes in jaguar abundance and the regional economic situation. Livestock loss and threat to human safety were not the only predictors of the perceived conflict with jaguars. Livestock loss acted in combination with attitudes, knowledge and perceptions of the economic situation to determine how people perceive the impact jaguars have on their livelihoods. Attitudes and knowledge were influenced by age, gender and whether respondents lived in urban or rural areas. An experiment in which respondents were shown photographs of dead livestock, and asked to ascribe the cause of death, revealed an interaction between attitudes and knowledge: of respondents whose knowledge of the species was low, those with negative attitudes towards jaguars assigned a larger number of photographs to jaguar depredation. Our evidence suggests that attitudes and knowledge can affect the conclusions a rancher draws from finding the carcass of a cow, or even from noticing that a cow is missing. The owners of smaller holdings believed that depredation was more serious on neighboring properties than on their own, which suggests that their perceptions of conflict with jaguars were shaped primarily by what is heard from other people, and not by personal experience.

Introduction

Jaguars (Panthera onca) often kill livestock and in some rare circumstances they can attack humans, both leading to severe persecution (Jędrzejewski et al., 2017). Killing jaguars is one of the most serious threats to their survival (Zeller, 2007; Galetti et al., 2013). Together with habitat loss, persecution has reduced jaguars to 46% of their historical range (Sanderson et al., 2002). Brazil arguably contains the largest population of jaguars, and it encompasses the two largest strongholds for the species (Sanderson et al., 2002): the Amazonian rainforests and the wetlands of the Pantanal. In both Amazonia and the Pantanal, jaguars occur mostly outside of protected areas. Strictly protected areas account for about 8.3% of the Brazilian Amazon (Ferreira et al., 2014) and 2.9% of the Pantanal territories. Most encounters between people and jaguars in Amazonia and Pantanal, and certainly in the other Brazilian biomes, take place in rural contexts. Therefore, the future of jaguars is likely to be tightly linked to the perceptions of Brazilian rural residents. However, despite the rapid growth of our understanding and acknowledgement of the role of social and psychological factors in determining human tolerance and behavior towards wildlife in general (Manfredo, 2008; Kansky et al., 2016), and carnivores in particular (Dickman et al., 2013; Bruskotter and Wilson, 2013; Treves and Bruskotter, 2014), little is known about the relationship between actual livestock loss and perceived impacts associated with jaguars. In conflicts between people and carnivores, the perceived impacts often exceed the actual evidence (Conover, 2002; Marchini and Macdonald, 2012). Such imprecise relationship between reality and perception could prove perilous to a threatened species, rendering ineffective many biologically based conservation and management actions (Cavalcanti et al., 2010). In the meantime, recommendations for conservation and conflict mitigation still emphasize the importance of retaliatory and preventive killing (Galetti et al., 2013).

Early studies on local perceptions of jaguars in Brazil assessed the role of socio-demographic factors in human-jaguar conflict (Conforti and Azevedo, 2003; Michalski et al., 2006; Palmeira and Barrella, 2007; Santos et al., 2008; Marchini and Crawshaw, 2015). Among the 50 landowners interviewed in northern Pantanal by Zimmermann and Walpole (2005), attitudes towards jaguars were more closely related to respondents' age and relative wealth than to cattle losses, with younger and wealthier ranchers holding more positive attitudes towards them. Also in the Pantanal, Porfirio et al. (2016) interviewed 50 riverside inhabitants and found that the negative perceptions of jaguars were related to people's safety and not to economic losses from livestock depredation. Marchini and Macdonald (2012) examined the influence of peers and social norms on poaching intentions. Based on interviews with 268 cattle ranchers in Amazonia and Pantanal, they concluded that social factors were more influential than retaliation for jaguar predation on cattle or perceived threats to humans. The ranchers' intentions to kill jaguars positively correlated with the size of their land holdings and were best explained by social norms; ranchers who believed that others kill jaguars or expected such poaching had a stronger intention to kill jaguars themselves. Altogether these studies revealed strong and contradictory attitudes towards the species and, along with our previous results (Cavalcanti et al., 2010), suggest that the perceived impact of jaguars on human livelihoods may often exceed the evidence.

We assessed peoples' perceptions of the impact of jaguars on livelihoods in Amazonia and the Pantanal, and explored relationships between these perceptions and socio-economic variables such as age, gender, place of residence (urban/rural) and property size, plus psychological variables such as experiences, attitudes and knowledge about jaguars. We hypothesized that perceptions of jaguar impact on human livelihoods are not explained solely by the loss of livestock to jaguars, or by attacks on humans, but socio-economic and psychological factors as well. Given the socio-economic and cultural differences between the Amazon deforestation frontier and the Pantanal (see below), we expected cattle ranchers in the two study areas to differ in their perceptions of the impact of jaguars on their livelihoods, irrespective of the damage posed by jaguars (Hypothesis 1). We also expected that perceptions of the impact of jaguars on livelihoods and attitudes to jaguars would not differ between cattle ranchers – who are exposed to both livestock loss and personal damage by jaguars – and farmers - who are exposed to personal damage but not livestock loss (Hypothesis 2). Furthermore, we hypothesized that the perceived impact of the jaguar on human safety would not be necessarily greater among rural residents – who are potentially exposed to the attack by jaguars – than among urban residents – who are not (Hypothesis 3). We expected negative experiences with jaguars (i.e. attack of jaguars on livestock and people) to determine perceptions of jaguar impact on livestock and human safety (Hypothesis 4). However, we hypothesized that attitudes towards jaguars and knowledge about the species would also influence these perceptions (Hypothesis 5). Age, gender and property size were expected to indirectly affect perceptions of impact by their effect on attitudes and knowledge (Hypothesis 6). To investigate further the role of negative experiences versus attitudes and knowledge in determining perceptions of jaguar impact on livestock, we conducted an experiment in which respondents were asked to interpret photographs of dead cattle and assign the most likely cause of death. We hypothesized that respondents with stronger negative attitudes to jaguars and less knowledge about them would assign more photographs to jaguar predation (Hypothesis 7).

Section snippets

Study areas and participants

This study was conducted in Amazonia and Pantanal (Fig. 1). In Amazonia we worked in the districts of Alta Floresta and Novo Mundo, on the frontier of deforestation in the north of the state of Mato Grosso, southern Amazonia. Alta Floresta was founded in 1976 and colonized by migrant farmers, mostly from southern Brazil. Today, its economy is based primarily on cattle ranching, timber extraction and agriculture, although 80% of Alta Floresta's approximately 50,000 inhabitants live in its urban

Characteristics of sample

We conducted a total of 463 interviews including 52 in urban Pantanal, 50 in urban Amazonia, 48 in rural Pantanal and 313 in rural Amazonia. The rural Amazonia sample included 92 properties where agriculture was the main economic activity and no cattle were raised. Table 2 presents additional sample characteristics.

Perceptions of jaguar impact on human livelihoods

In support of Hypothesis 1, cattle ranchers in Amazonia and the Pantanal differed in their perceptions of the impact of jaguars on their livelihoods. Perceived jaguar impact on

Discussion and conclusions

We examined the drivers of perceptions of jaguar impact on human livelihood and identified two distinct dimensions in our sample: impact on livestock and impact on human safety. These can best be addressed separately. We found that perceived jaguar impact on human livelihoods are hugely influenced by region and place of residence, with perceived impact on livestock being greater in the Pantanal, and perceived impact on human safety being greater in the Amazon, and in urban than in rural areas.

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