IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| L›e, J.; R›skaft, E. | |
| Large carnivores and human safety: a review | |
| 2002 Manuscript | |
Attacks by large carnivores on humans are rare and in most areas and time periods they are non-existing. Still, they draw much attention from media and stakeholders in large carnivore conservation and sometimes contribute significantly to create negative attitudes among local people against carnivore conservation efforts. We tried to review what scientists have done to address human safety concerns in large carnivore conservation and, based on three criteria, judge if this is satisfactory to give justified statements about attack occurrences and their causes. The criteria that were judged were 1) If there exist clear sources for numbers of attacks occurring with different species of large carnivores in different areas, 2) If there exist formal systems for registration of details of what has happened in each attack once an attack occur and 3) If there exist studies that can give credible statements of what to do when encountering a large carnivore, so that the likelihood of being attacked are minimized. We conclude that only rare information exist on each of the three criteria and that we based on this must conclude that present information available is unsatisfactory to mitigate future information requests about attack frequencies, their causes and avoidance. We suggest that formal information systems including attack/encounter database(s) should be implemented in large carnivore conservation to mitigate future information requests. |
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