The Predation Paradox: Why Conflict with Wildlife is Rarely About the Wildlife

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p46dDRnZBj0

Research by Esther Padrós García, Kodkod Field Studies Center, 2026

A puma kills a sheep on a farm near Pucón. An American mink raids a henhouse. A neighbour's dog goes after the same flock. In each case, an animal has caused real damage — but the human response to each incident is strikingly different. The puma is tolerated. The mink is despised. And the dog? The dog represents something else entirely: a breakdown of trust between neighbours.

Why do people respond so differently to the same kind of loss? That is the question at the heart of Esther Padrós García's research, carried out across 66 rural households in the Araucanía region of Chile.

It's not about the numbers

The instinctive assumption in wildlife management is that conflict is essentially an economic problem. Animals kill livestock; farmers lose money; resentment builds. The solution, by this logic, is compensation and better fencing.

But Esther's research tells a more complicated story. When she looked carefully at what actually drove people's tolerance — or intolerance — toward different animals, the amount of damage suffered turned out to be a surprisingly weak predictor. Farmers who had lost significant numbers of animals to pumas still did not, on the whole, want pumas removed. Meanwhile, the American mink — an invasive species that causes relatively modest economic harm — attracted near-universal hostility.

The difference, it turns out, is not the damage. It is the story people tell about the animal causing it.

Cultural legitimacy: the right to belong

Pumas belong here. They are part of the landscape, part of the ecology, part of the identity of Araucanía. When a puma kills livestock, people recognise it as the behaviour of a wild animal doing what wild animals do. There is a kind of moral acceptance built into that — what the research calls a "moral pass" that naturalises predation by native species.

The American mink, by contrast, has no such standing. It is an outsider — introduced, invasive, with no cultural roots in the landscape. Its presence feels illegitimate, and so even minor damage provokes a much stronger desire for removal.

Fear tells a similar story. People in the study reported genuine fear of pumas — yet that fear did not translate into demands to reduce puma populations. Fear of pumas, it seems, is part of the cultural landscape too: something to be lived with, not eliminated.

When man's best friend becomes the villain

The most striking finding involves domestic dogs. Free-roaming dogs are responsible for substantial livestock losses in rural Araucanía — in some cases more than any wild species. Yet the anger they provoke is of a different kind entirely. It is not directed at the dogs themselves, but at their owners.

A dog attack is not a wildlife incident. It is a social failure — a neighbour not taking responsibility, a community norm being broken. The intolerance it generates is rooted not in biology but in a sense of betrayal. No amount of compensation or fencing addresses that.

What this means for conservation

Esther's research carries a clear message for anyone working in wildlife conservation: conflict between humans and animals is rarely really about the animals. It is about what those animals represent — whether they are seen as legitimate members of the landscape or unwelcome outsiders, whether their behaviour fits within a community's sense of what is natural and acceptable.

This means that effective conservation cannot rely solely on technical fixes. It has to engage with the deeper values and cultural narratives that shape how people relate to the wildlife around them. Building genuine coexistence means working with communities, not just compensating them — fostering the sense of shared responsibility and cultural connection that gives wild species the social licence to stay.

At Kodkod, this kind of research is not just academic. It reflects the questions we live with every day, in a landscape where pumas, foxes, kodkods, and people are all trying to find their place.

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