Dog Management and Owner Perceptions: Implications for Wildlife Conservation in Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, India
Abstract
Free-ranging domestic dogs threaten wild species in natural ecosystems due to disease transmission, competition with wild predators, and predation of wild prey. Despite the deeply commensal nature of the dog-human relationship, it is often not included as a dimension of dog-wildlife conflict. To understand how and why people keep dogs in areas with wildlife presence, as well as people’s perceptions of dog-wildlife interaction, we conducted surveys in five villages within Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, India, where animal birth control has been ongoing for almost three decades. Seventy percent (n = 81) of respondents kept dogs, of which most were free-ranging and fed leftover human food. Dogs were primarily kept for security purposes by the majority (n = 40) of dog owners. The majority of respondents also supported sterilization programs (n = 95), believed that dogs did not affect wildlife (n = 48), that dogs did not enter the forest (n = 50), and that leopard lifting of dogs was widespread (n = 67). Almost none of these responses showed any difference with respect to demographic variables (age class, sex, and dog ownership) when tested with Fisher’s exact test. While reporting of predation by dogs may have been biased by fear of punitive action, our results indicate that dogs are a valuable security system that protect life and property from wildlife, potentially mitigating human-wildlife conflict. They also indicate that the cause and extent of dog-wildlife encounters require research attention. Both dog management and wildlife conservation strategies should take into account the needs of local residents as well as multidimensional aspects of the dog-human-wildlife interface, such as garbage dumps attracting wildlife to villages, to achieve successful long-term outcomes.
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