Eye in the Sky: Dr. Adam Cruise
Terms of Conflict in Conservation; one of the more innovative ways of conserving wildlife is change our common usage of certain words and terms.
Language is a powerful tool that can intensify biases towards ethnic groups, genders, minorities and other animals. Human language can affect our attitudes toward other animals, which is often manifested in violent treatment of them.
Wildlife declines and the failed attempts at conserving them is often mired in how we deploy human language. In wildlife conservation, humans ‘harvest’ instead of ‘kill’ dozens of wild animals as if they were crops. Hunted animals are referred to as ‘game’, and the activity of shooting them as trophies is a ‘sport’ which the hunter ‘bags’.
By changing such terms, we can effectively regard wild animals as sentient beings to be protected rather than ‘objects’ or ‘resources’ for human pleasure and consumption.
What’s in a name?
Outside Hwange National Park, a small non-governmental organisation has effectively changed local attitudes toward African wild dogs simply by calling the dogs something else.
Wild dogs have historically suffered negative consequences led by ignorance and prejudice. The organisation – Painted Dog Conservation – felt that the word ‘wild’ fostered a negative attitude toward the species and likely had a lot to do with the historical persecution of them. As a result, the name ‘wild dog’ connotes an unbridled dangerous canine that intentionally creates havoc on civilised societies and domestic animals.
The switch from ‘wild’ to ‘painted’, then, effectively disarms that negative perception for something positive. ‘Painted’ allows for the human to view the dogs for their aesthetic beauty rather than their perceived aberrant behaviour.
From conflict to coexistence
Another problematic term is the concept of ‘human-wildlife conflict’ or HWC. Throughout Africa (and indeed the rest of the world), as humans expand deeper into the wilderness, they come into more contact with wild animals in ever-decreasing natural habitats. Human language describes these forms of contact as ‘conflict’.
A typical case of HWC would be elephants ‘raiding’ crops or lions ‘attacking’ livestock. This means the culpability of such conflict lies entirely with elephants or lions of them consciously and deliberately initiating the conflict. It implies that a human retaliation for their misdemeanours is justified. Such implications promote human antagonism towards wildlife that can exacerbate the problem further, hinder resolution with potentially adverse conservation outcomes for endangered species.
In most cases, it is humans that are problematic. For example, I have often heard that there are “too many elephants”. They are responsible for raiding crops and damaging waterpipes. Yet, overall elephant numbers are declining. In reality, it means if there is an increase in elephant-related incidences, it is because there is far less space for elephants to range and forage than in the past. In short, it is the humans and their crops that have raided the habitat of elephants, not the other way around.
When elephants, and other wild animals, are not seen as conflict-instigators then better solutions to mitigate the issues may emerge. The term ‘human-wildlife coexistence’ now becomes the appropriate term to use. This paves the way for us humans to acknowledge the integrity of wild animals within their natural environment and our desire to exist peacefully with them. The idea of coexistence is to maintain as much of the natural environment for wild animals as possible for them to roam freely and, for us to find alternatives to live alongside them rather than to kill them.
Comments