Predator-Resembling Aversive Conditioning for Managing Habituated Wildlife

By E. L. Kloppers, T. Hurd. 2005

107 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Wildlife habituation near urban centers can disrupt natural ecological processes, destroy habitat, and threaten public safety. Consequently, management of habituated animals is typically invasive and often includes translocation of these animals to remote areas and sometimes even their destruction. Techniques to prevent or reverse habituation and other forms of in situ management are necessary to balance ecological and social requirements, but they have received very little experimental attention to date. This study compared the efficacy of two aversive conditioning treatments that used either humans or dogs to create sequences resembling chases by predators, which, along with a control category, were repeatedly and individually applied to 24 moderately habituated, radio-collared elk in Banff National Park during the winter of 2001-2002. Three response variables were measured before and after treatment. Relative to untreated animals, the distance at which elk fled from approaching humans, i.e., the flight response distance, increased following both human and dog treatments, but there was no difference between the two treatments. The proportion of time spent in vigilance postures decreased for all treatment groups, without differences among groups, suggesting that this behavior responded mainly to seasonal effects. The average distance between elk locations and the town boundary, measured once daily by telemetry, significantly increased for human-conditioned elk. One of the co-variates we measured, wolf activity, exerted counteracting effects on conditioning effects; flight response distances and proximity to the town site were both lower when wolf activity was high. This research demonstrates that it is possible to temporarily modify aspects of the behavior of moderately habituated elk using aversive conditioning, suggests a method for reducing habituation in the first place, and provides a solution for Banff and other jurisdictions to manage hyperabundant and habituated urban wildlife.

Subfields: Developmental Biology, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/10bec9821cbc3732f4d8334df88b31640cb630f4

How researchers see this paper

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In Developmental Biology

1. K. Crooks

In Ecology

1. S. George
2. J. Kusak
3. M. Hayward
4. P. Haswell
5. K. Crooks
6. G. Kerley
7. J. O’Brien
8. Rob Slotow

Citations in the corpus

• Recreation and large mammal activity in an urban nature reserve (2006, background): “…desensitized to recurrent human disturbances in some situations but not others, and such habituation may have both beneficial and negative impacts (Knight and Gutzwiller, 1995; Whittaker and Knight, 1998; Taylor and Knight, 2003; Kloppers et al., 2005; Magle et al., 2005; Smith et al., 2005).”
• Large carnivore impacts are context-dependent (2017, background): “The positive (Kilgo et al. 1998; Kloppers et al. 2005; Leighton et al. 2010) or negative (Hebblewhite et al. 2005; Jayakody et al. 2008; Pelletier 2006) nature of this disturbance however depends entirely on management perspective (Reimoser 2003).”