Why do many wildlife conservation and management programs struggle to meet their goals of protecting threatened species and preventing conflicts between humans and wildlife? New research from Boston University, Clark University, and New York University published in “Conservation Biology“, finds that one reason may be how we relate to wild animals in the first place. Instead of thinking of wildlife as objects or stock to be managed, the authors suggest new ways to engage with animals to help conservationists make decisions.
Wildlife managers and conservationists can look to animals’ behaviors: letting their actions, personalities, group decisions, and other surprising behaviors illuminate better ways to help preserve their populations. In this way, animals can be seen as partners or “agents” in their own conservation.
Important decisions about where and how to include animals in conservation are increasingly urgent as environmental change brings wildlife into greater contact with people. “Human caused pressures on the environment like climate change and deforestation are bringing wild animals into greater contact and conflict with human society,” says Émilie Edelblutte, co-lead researcher and PhD candidate at Boston University. “But we may be short changing ourselves by making decisions for animals rather than letting them show us what their preferences are, in terms of what they want to eat, where they want to move, and even how they want to interact with humans.”
One example of that is leopards in Mumbai, where Edelblutte has conducted some of her previous research. There, conservationists assumed the leopards would prefer a pristine park over heavily trafficked suburban areas. But leopards have actually excelled at adapting to urban areas and making use of resources in ways that humans never anticipated. It turns out that animals are making active decisions about how to protect themselves and thrive all the time. By collecting and analyzing examples like this one and many others, Edelblutte and her coauthors argue that scientists and conservationists can pay attention to these decisions that wildlife make for themselves, in order to achieve better conservation outcomes.
The authors found that multiple fields of study have shown that animals have agency. That is, all animals can adapt to and exert influence on the conservation plans that humans make for them because of their sentience, individuality, and even their cultures. “We identified dozens of studies that support this idea: city raccoons have bolder personalities than rural raccoons, elephants communicate about the best ways to raid crops, and bears learn which areas are protected and which have hunters,” says Roopa Krithivasan, another co-author on the study and PhD candidate at Clark University. In the context of conservation, this means that animals use their own agency to actively influence and participate in conservation and management outcomes, in ways that constantly reshape the landscapes, cultures, and histories that humans and wildlife share.
Throughout history, communities have incorporated animal agency into how they manage wildlife – for example, recognition of marine mammals’ personhood is an important tenet of Arctic peoples who have sustainably managed beluga whale populations for generations. However, only a few western conservation paradigms really consider animal agency. Those that do show promising results. For example, some conservationists are calling for the protection of not just species, but cultural groups of animals that teach each other skills that aid their survival, such as the highly specialized hunting cultures of orcas. Others have experimented with “interspecies decision-making” where conservationists allowed gulls to “show them” where they preferred to make their nests.
The research found evidence that can help conservationists by drawing on years of research on animals in other fields, from psychology to law. “Our findings that animals shape their own conservation outcomes fits with evidence from psychologists who study animals’ behavior and even lawyers who defend animals in legal cases” says Matthew Hayek, another coauthor and an Assistant Professor at New York University. “It was a privilege to get to pull so much diverse evidence together in one place, and provide new recommendations for conservationists in their work helping preserve our biosphere, during this time of unprecedented global environmental changes.”
This research has also been profiled in The Brink.