We’ve been working on wildlife issues since the 1960s, and we’ve been engaged in the challenges of living and interacting with urban wildlife for almost as long. John Griffin, senior director of urban wildlife programs at the Humane Society of the United States, recently co-authored an essay on urban wildlife. Here he describes the transformative potential of the work we’re doing to promote human-wildlife coexistence.
For many years, my colleagues and I in the Urban Wildlife Programs division of the Humane Society of the United States have been making the case that the conventional wildlife management paradigm in North America is inadequate to meet the needs of the 21st century. Our criticism is rooted in our experience with urban wildlife management, an emerging discipline that attempts to describe, study and manage the systems that result from humans and wild animals inhabiting a community together.
Urban wildlife science is built around a host of recurring issues that arise from society’s lack of infrastructure and humane responses to match the predominant patterns of human living and the way most of us encounter wildlife. That’s the perspective that shapes the ideas we’ve put forward in city council and community association meetings, state legislatures, university lecture halls, wildlife conferences and more, pressing for implementation of humane techniques and approaches that both prevent and resolve human-wildlife conflicts.
Just as importantly, we’ve advanced and implemented practical strategies and approaches in a broad array of urban wildlife management situations. These involve humane exclusion of wildlife from human dwellings and other structures and built landscapes, wildlife-friendly design and planning, social marketing and behavior change strategies to shape human responses to animal-related challenges, and innovative conflict resolution methods that are humane and non-lethal.
We’re often out in the field, demonstrating, evaluating and helping to implement transformational techniques and approaches. Dozens of species come within our remit including bears, chipmunks, deer, eagles, foxes, groundhogs, horses, prairie dogs, raccoons, snakes and more. In our work we frequently encounter a public that is surprised to learn that so many diverse species exist and even flourish within human communities.
Over the years, we’ve learned a lot about these species, and we’ve applied that knowledge to forging better and more humane solutions to conflicts. One of the most important channels for advancing the field involves our close collaboration with local humane societies, law enforcement agencies, and animal care and control agencies, to enhance their capacity to respond to human-wildlife interactions more humanely and more effectively.
Both our communications strategies and our practical approaches address the reality that—to an ever-increasing degree—wild animals occupy the spaces and places in which we humans live. To ignore their presence or to assume that they don’t belong in these spaces and places is not only unhelpful but serves to exacerbate those conflicts that do surface. That reaction also leaves people and communities without the resources and strategies needed to prevent conflicts and responses that resolve issues when they occur, increasing the chances of negative outcomes for both humans and wild animals.
Over the long term, we’ve come to see cities as novel ecosystems in their own right―and one thing is clear. Our steadily increasing interactions with wildlife in urban and suburban communities raise substantial challenges to the conventional wildlife management paradigm. That paradigm is stuck in time, largely driven by the goal of managing wildlife populations—like sustainable crops—in more remote areas, and exclusively for hunting, trapping and fishing.
Of course, people are interested in encountering wild animals in all kinds of other ways (such as in birding and wildlife watching, hiking, camping and river treks). That’s another reason why we’re making the case that a new paradigm for wildlife management is needed, one that takes greater account of the contexts in which people most often encounter wildlife, and one that gives much greater consideration to the views and perspectives of people who live in urban and suburban areas. These are the very citizens whose ideas and values are usually ignored by wildlife commissions and agencies at the local, state and federal levels.
The presence of wildlife in urban and suburban contexts involves different social, cultural and technical considerations. To an ever-increasing degree, their presence demands new approaches. A number of factors have played a part in this change, such as rising attention to the social and psychological benefits of human-wildlife coexistence in urban areas; the embrace of nonlethal tools and strategies of management; a growing recognition of the impact the built environment has on wildlife; and a wider understanding of the inadequacy of current regulatory frameworks for addressing urban wildlife concerns. Undergirding these factors is an evolving ethical framework for thinking about the needs of wild animals and our obligations to them.
Wildlife management arose in part because of concerns from hunters and trappers about maintaining populations of wild animals for them to pursue as targets. Since then, the concept of wildlife management has changed, and notions of coexistence with wildlife have arisen that contend with that narrowly focused model. The ideas and solutions related to addressing human-wildlife interactions that take hold in more densely populated human communities carry deep implications throughout our society, challenging the traditional paradigm that governs most conventional wildlife agencies in the United States and abroad.
But we live in and operate on a different landscape now. Animals will continue to flourish in urbanized areas, adapting to our habits and our ways of living. And we should learn to accept and work to integrate them safely, sensibly and compassionately into our communities and environments.
At one level, urban wildlife science and practice represent a needed and logical expansion of traditional professional wildlife management. However, it’s important to recognize this newer paradigm’s transformative power when it comes to rethinking wildlife management overall. For example, it is not generally focused on increasing wildlife presence in cities, certainly not for hunting or other consumptive purposes. In this sense, it points the way toward a future in which the consumptive view of wildlife loses importance.
In the end, we should learn to treat our urban spaces and our remote natural spaces as a unified moral landscape, one on which we seek to achieve the safest and best possible outcomes for wild animals, wherever they may live.
Download our guide to human-wildlife interactions.
John Griffin is a senior director of urban wildlife programs at the Humane Society of the United States.
