Resolving Human Wildlife Conflict

Resolving Human Wildlife Conflict

Human-Wildlife interactions have both positive and negative impacts. While the positive impact of the interactions encourage the co-existence, the negative impacts cause destruction and death on both sides. This interaction between human and animal which has negative impact is referred to as Human-Wildlife Conflict.

The main cause of this Human-Wildlife conflict is the blurring boundaries of the resources and territory due to agricultural expansion, human settlement, over grazing by livestock, deforestation, illegal grass collection and poaching.

In Uttarakhand, the biggest casualty of this conflict is agriculture. Crop raiding by elephants, wild boars, monkeys, langoors and ungulates among other species causes severe damage to crops and consequently farmer have to incur heavy losses. In cases involving wild boars complete farm is sometimes uprooted and destroyed.

Crop raiding is a major form of human-wildlife conflict and its mitigation has become crucial to realise long term wildlife conservation and to protect the livelihood of the farmers. Since, majority of villages, especially in hilly regions, are surrounded by forests, wild animals like wild boars, barking deers, and other ungulates are the main culprits causing the damage due to crop raiding.

Various guarding measures are being employed by farmers like night visits, dogs, fencing, tin boxes and fire crackers. But unfortunately there measures are not helping in reducing the crop raiding.

UDAAN is working in direction of innovating independently and involving various agencies to find innovative and effective measures to reduce or prevent crop raiding.