18th April 2019

Feeding someone in need is considered philanthropy. And if others benefit from our leftovers, isn’t it a win-win situation?

Not always, say scientists.

Recent studies say that ‘human subsidy’ is a major driver of the increase in wildlife-human conflict, especially in urban areas. The rise of urban sprawls results in increased access to food, shelter and other resources—collectively called human subsidies—for wildlife. These subsidies can be intentional (e.g. direct feeding) or unintentional (e.g. waste dumping, presence of livestock). Wild species, which have the ability to adapt, choose growing urban settlements for survival rather than struggling with dwindling forest resources. This is not just a threat to city-dwelling humans, but also a grave ecological concern.

“The term ‘human-wildlife conflict’ creates a picture of unruly, ferocious beasts within human establishments. I suggest visualising these as dynamic interactions between humans and wild animals respectively ‘occupying’ rapidly expanding urban spaces and constantly shrinking wild systems. More often than not, urban human-wildlife interactions are the result of enormous food subsidies offered by urban waste and socio-religious acts,” explains Nishant Kumar, a researcher jointly based at Edward Grey Institute, the University of Oxford and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII).

Read full story here