Communities living at the boundaries of wildlife habitat face daily human-wildlife interactions that affect both human safety and animal welfare. Understanding these interfaces informs more effective coexistence strategies.
Human-wildlife interface welfare involves both the animals that come into conflict with communities and the humans who bear the costs of living near wildlife. Retaliatory killing of lions, leopards, elephants, and other species by communities that experience livestock predation or crop raiding is a welfare and conservation problem driven by economic reality rather than malice. Solutions that reduce economic costs of coexistence — livestock protection improvements, compensation schemes, wildlife tourism revenue sharing — address the welfare problem at its economic root. Programs that understand community perspectives and integrate local knowledge produce more durable coexistence than externally imposed conservation restrictions that ignore the costs communities bear. Both human wellbeing and animal welfare are served by coexistence approaches that are economically viable for the communities involved.