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Characterizing Elephant-Livestock Interactions Using a Social-Ecological Approach

2022; Springer Nature; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-030-93604-4_13

2196-971X

John Kioko, Sophie E. Moore, Kathleen Moshofsky, Anne Nonnamaker, Blaise Ebanietti, Katharine E. T. Thompson, Christian Kiffner,

Animal Behavior and Welfare Studies

In the Tarangire Ecosystem, elephants frequently use pastoral areas, where they interact with people and livestock. To characterize the elephant-livestock interface in Manyara Ranch, we used a social-ecological approach to capture the herders' and the elephants' perspectives of these interactions. We interviewed cattle herders to assess their perceptions of elephants relative to other wildlife species (n = 117 interviews) and observed how elephants responded to sound playbacks associated with humans and cattle relative to sounds of wildlife species (n = 300 playbacks). Most herders (86%) supported elephant conservation, and reported spatial avoidance of elephants as the main strategy to avoid negative interactions. Among eleven large mammal wildlife species, herders ranked elephants as the fifth most problematic species to cattle. Elephants frequently reacted (e.g., bunching, fleeing, shaking the head and moving the trunk, or approaching) to human-related sound playbacks (79% of playbacks), and reacted less frequently when exposed to sounds of cattle (62%) or wildlife (34%). Playback experiments suggested that while elephants primarily reacted non-aggressively when faced with livestock, aggressive elephant behavior may be triggered by human behavior. Evidence from both the interview data and the behavioral experiments suggest that coexistence between elephants and pastoralists is mostly facilitated by mutual spatial avoidance.