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What Do Local People Actually Think of Tigers?

By Nikolay Kazakov, SNRE PhD student

In one of his recent books, ‘The Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind," famous environmentalist and writer David Quammen¹ raised a very important and largely omitted issue in wildlife conservation: attitudes towards large predators. In collecting material for his book, Quammen traveled to five different locations around the world where large carnivores are at high risk for extinction. During his research, he concluded that a stark discrepancy exists in attitudes: while people from all over the world are concerned with the survival of a species, locals often view these animals as a nuisance, in many cases trying to get rid of them in order to protect their fields, cattle, and own lives. Following the book’s publication in 2003, I had a chance to meet David in his Bozeman, MT home to discuss these issues. He explained that his conclusions came after personal interactions with local people within each of these five sites. At one of these sites, located in the Far East of Russia (RFE), he focused on the critically endangered Amur tiger (erroneously known to Westerners as the Siberian tiger). And it was here, during the summer of 2007, that I had the opportunity to observe and measure this attitude discrepancy.

In the RFE, the Wildlife Conservation Society implements Tiger Friendly Certification (TFC), a community-based conservation project which uses socioeconomic incentives and capacity building in an attempt to transform local communities from being part of the problem (through poaching both tigers and their prey) into primary conservation agents at the grassroots level. One stated objective of the TFC project is promoting positive change in local community attitudes towards tigers and their conservation. Changing attitudes is important for three main reasons: a) changes that take place in local attitudes are good indicators of potential positive changes in behaviors, the overall goal of the project; b) positive attitudes towards tigers are an integral part of local capacity for community conservation action; and c) positive change in attitudes signifies long-term sustainability of changes well beyond the timeline of the intervention. Therefore, in order to see if the intervention is reaching its goals, and for adaptive management reasons, it is imperative to measure attitudes and their changes over time.

The instrument developed for this task was based on a Likert scale due to the inherent advantages of high validity, reliability and precision levels as well as the ability for researchers to tap attitudes on a supra cognitive level. The scale was designed to measure general attitudes towards tigers as well as attitudes toward five of the construct’s attributes: intrinsic values, economic values, poaching, competition with hunters, and conflict situations (which occur mainly when tigers enter villages in search of food, posing a threat to livestock and people).

During the summer of 2007, a team of two researchers administered the instrument to 246 randomly-sampled local members living within seventeen communities (both TFC and non-certified) within tiger habitats in the RFE. Some positive generalities seen within data analyses include: a) the attitudes that people in local communities have toward tigers are more positive than negative; b) the local people are proud to share the taiga forest with tigers; and c) the local people realize that human activities create many problems for tigers. At the same time, the local people do not generally view poaching as a major problem. Instead, they wrongly believe that poaching is a small issue, which Mother Nature easily takes care of.  The multiple linear regression model shows that the general attitude toward tigers as well as the abovementioned five attributes are shared by all strata of the local community population. Attitudes are not significantly affected by respondents’ sex, age, education, being a hunter, occupation or income. The only significant difference existed between certified and non-certified communities. In TFC communities, attitudes (both in general and towards each attribute) were more positive, with larger differences evident in economic value of tiger and conflict tigers.

Because of its design, this research cannot support or disapprove Quammen’s observations. However, it does indicate that attitudes can be positively changed in a short period of time by providing education and economic incentives for local communities to conserve their nature. So, the question now becomes: will residents in larger cities become more responsible and buy certified products in order to save tigers and help local communities see more value in a live rather than a dead tiger?

For more information about research on local attitudes towards large predators, contact Nickolay Kazakov at nkazakov@ufl.edu.

¹ Best known for his seminal book '"The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction.'