My family lives just outside New Delhi, India, and in 2008, our garden was invaded by monkeys. The monkeys quickly made themselves at home, launching themselves off of trees into the pond with shrieks of delight and wandering into the house to help themselves to toffees and aspirin.

Figure 1 ~  Hanuman Langur monkeys in Udaipur, India 

This invasion was remarkable because we know exactly how the monkeys reached our garden.

 For as long as anyone can remember, monkeys have lived in Delhi, eating stolen fruit, garbage, and tidbits offered to them by devout Hindus who worship the monkey god Hanuman. The Military Headquarters in central Delhi, home to a troop of macaques, are jokingly called the home of “The Army of Monkeys,” referring to Hanuman’s mythic army that saved the wife of Lord Rama from the demon Ravana in one of the great Hindu epics. Their ubiquity across the city illustrates how we can coexist with monkeys (Figure 1).

But in late 2007, the Deputy Mayor of Delhi was killed when he fell from his balcony during an altercation with a horde of monkeys []. Politicians and the public alike demanded action. Since exterminating the animals was unacceptable, given their religious significance, the outcry resulted in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi trapping monkeys from the city and releasing them in the nearby Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary []. Our house abuts this sanctuary, and the monkeys soon found our garden.

Delhi’s monkey situation exemplifies a common approach to dealing with human-wildlife conflict in India and globally—authorities respond by relocating “problem” animals away from human-dominated landscapes to areas where they ought to cause less trouble. However, growing scientific evidence suggests that these relocations are a source of increased human-animal conflict, and wildlife biologists have begun to advocate tolerance instead of avoidance as the preferred way of mitigating this conflict [].

Human-leopard overlap

Some of the most comprehensive research on human-animal conflict in India has been conducted on leopards by wildlife biologist Vidya Athreya and her colleagues. Remarkably, her research has revealed that leopards actually thrive in close proximity to people. By installing camera traps along the trails that wind through agricultural fields in a densely populated rural landscape in western India, Athreya estimated that her study site was home to at least 12 different adult leopards, at a density of roughly one leopard every 20 square kilometers. This may not sound like much, until you consider that in the same time period and location that the camera traps captured 81 photographs of leopards, they also took 830 photographs of humans! The same leopards were also spotted multiple times, often with cubs, suggesting that they comprised a firmly established and reproducing population, and were not occasional vagrants wandering into the fields from forested areas [].

But what about conflict? In this particular area of human-leopard overlap, there isn’t much conflict at all—leopards attack livestock only rarely (they feed primarily on stray dogs and pigs), and no fatal attacks on humans have been reported []. Attacks on livestock and people instead seem to arise when leopards are forcibly removed from the human-dominated landscapes they call home [].

One crucial fact about leopards explains why relocation often fails: leopards are highly territorial. Being territorial gives them a strong homing instinct, a desire to return to where they came from when released hundreds of kilometers away. While attempting to find home, these disoriented leopards must move through unfamiliar areas with high human densities. By tracing spatial and temporal patterns of conflict, Athreya and colleagues have shown that conflict increases after relocation, primarily in areas along the predicted paths that leopards can follow from their site of release back to their initial point of capture. For example, all of the leopard attacks on humans in two districts that Athreya studied coincided with the release of leopards in nearby protected areas []. It turns out that relocating animals doesn’t necessarily reduce conflict in the removal area either, as vacancies left by relocated leopards are rapidly filled by younger leopards seeking a territory, so humans may still overlap with leopards in these same areas despite leopard removal []. Moreover, male newcomers often kill the cubs of previous territorial males, inducing females to reproduce again and suffer the stresses of supporting cubs for even longer []. Relocation is therefore a bad idea for both leopards and people.

Relocation seems more humane than culling, but given its known downsides, is relocation still an option? If not, how can human-wildlife conflict be mitigated? More than a few wildlife biologists maintain that coexistence might be the answer []. And perhaps this isn’t surprising—as Athreya and her colleagues have shown, humans and leopards can coexist with minimal conflict []. In fact, Athreya believes that the best approach to alleviate conflict is simply “an acceptance of situations where humans and wildlife share multi-use landscapes to the extent possible” [].

An alternative to relocation

For coexistence to work, we must understand how animals behave in conflict situations. Even a little bit of science can go a long way. For example, learning that leopards identify prey by sound leads to a simple guideline for coexistence—if you’re walking through the fields at night, playing music from your cellphone can prevent leopards from mistaking you for a dog []. Conversely, research also suggests that rethinking our own preconceived notions about human-animal conflict could help alleviate concerns about coexistence. For instance, people frequently overestimate the threat posed by wildlife. Take the case of the Zanzibar Red Colobus monkey, which feeds on immature coconuts. Though farmers believe that these monkeys decimate their coconut crops, the presence of monkeys in a coconut grove is actually correlated with higher yields, possibly because the monkeys prune the coconut trees, which is a recommended agricultural practice []. And, because these endangered monkeys are also a tourist attraction, coexistence might be in everybody’s best interests.

After several years of conflict, my family has adopted a strategy of tolerance towards the monkeys in our garden. We’ve learned that leaving food outside of a cupboard or refrigerator is equivalent to inviting the monkeys inside, and that we can only grow vegetables that the monkeys don’t want to eat. And the monkeys now know to move out of the way when my parents go on their morning walk armed with bamboo sticks to scare them away. I like to think of our coexistence as a tiny step in the direction of a new conservation paradigm.

Ambika Kamath is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

REFERENCES

[] BBC News Service. 2007. Monkeys attack Delhi politician. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7055625.stm

[] Ashok, S. 2013. A royal stay at Asola Bhatti Sanctuary. The Hindu.

[] Athreya, V., M. Odden, J.D.C. Linnell, J. Krishnaswamy, U. Karanth. Big cats in our backyards: persistence of large carnivores in a human dominated landscape in India. PLoS One 8(3): e57872

[] Athreya, V.R., S.S. Thakur, S. Chaudhuri, and A. V. Belsare. 2007. Leopards in human-dominated areas: a spillover from sustained translocations into nearby forests? Journal of Bombay Natural History Society 104: 45-50.

[] Balme, G.A., and L.T.B. Hunter. 2013. Why leopards commit infanticide. Animal Behaviour 86: 791-799.

[] Woodroffe, R., S. Thirgood, and A. Rabinowitz. 2005. People and wildlife, Conflict or Coexistence? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

[]Ghosal, S. 2012. Q&A with Vidya Athreya. Tehelka News Service.

[] Siex, K.S., and T.T. Struhsaker. 1999. Colobus monkeys and coconuts: a study of perceived human-wildlife conflicts. Journal of Applied Ecology 36: 1009-1020.