Human Wildlife Conflict Essay

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Human wildlife conflict is defined by the world wide fund for nature (WWF) as “any interaction between humans and wildlife that results in negative impacts on human social, economic or cultural life, on the conservation of wildlife populations, or on the environment.” Although 60% of Bhutan’s biodiversity is under forest coverage, human wildlife conflict still prevails in Bhutan due to population explosion. As per Wangdi (2013), “human wildlife conflict is mainly due to expanding of human population into the resources available in search of food and shelter which creates intense competition between wildlife and man.” More than 70% of population depends directly on crops and livestock production for their livelihood. Hence the human wildlife Due to this drawback of the farmers wild animals tend to visit the nearby human area or settlement and attacked the livestock and damaged the crops. Since, most of the Bhutanese people depend upon the subsistence farming they cannot afford to lose their source of livelihood to the wild animals. Many cases of wildlife attack on domesticated animals and crops have been forwarded to government with the hope of getting help from the government. It was noted that animal crop loss faced by the farmer ranged from 0.3 to 18% of the total household income. On average farmers spend about two months a year guardian their maize and rice from wildlife. Farmers also reported livestock depredation by wild predators totaling 2.3% of their domestic animals over the past Research has shown that the very reason for the wildlife to come near the human settlement area is due to explosion of population and lack of resources that force people to extend their settlement further, destroying the habitant of wildlife and causing disturbance in the food chain of animals. Wildlife with no choice migrates down to human settlement area, looking for the food and the place to live. For instance, in the past year, a bear attacked a farmer and caused many damages to the crop in

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