Animal agency in wildlife conservation and management |
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Authors: | Émilie Edelblutte Roopa Krithivasan Matthew Nassif Hayek |
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Institution: | 1. Earth and Environment Department, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA;2. Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA;3. Department of Environmental Studies, New York University, New York, New York, USA |
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Abstract: | Wildlife conservation and management (WCM) practices have been historically drawn from a wide variety of academic fields, yet practitioners have been slow to engage with emerging conversations about animals as complex beings, whose individuality and sociality influence their relationships with humans. We propose an explicit acknowledgement of wild, nonhuman animals as active participants in WCM. We examined 190 studies of WCM interventions and outcomes to highlight 3 common assumptions that underpin many present approaches to WCM: animal behaviors are rigid and homogeneous; wildlife exhibit idealized wild behavior and prefer pristine habitats; and human–wildlife relationships are of marginal or secondary importance relative to nonhuman interactions. We found that these management interventions insufficiently considered animal learning, decision-making, individuality, sociality, and relationships with humans and led to unanticipated detrimental outcomes. To address these shortcomings, we synthesized theoretical advances in animal behavioral sciences, animal geographies, and animal legal theory that may help conservation professionals reconceptualize animals and their relationships with humans. Based on advances in these fields, we constructed the concept of animal agency, which we define as the ability of animals to actively influence conservation and management outcomes through their adaptive, context-specific, and complex behaviors that are predicated on their sentience, individuality, lived experiences, cognition, sociality, and cultures in ways that shape and reshape shared human–wildlife cultures, spaces, and histories. Conservation practices, such as compassionate conservation, convivial conservation, and ecological justice, incorporate facets of animal agency. Animal agency can be incorporated in conservation problem-solving by assessing the ways in which agency contributes to species’ survival and by encouraging more adaptive and collaborative decision-making among human and nonhuman stakeholders. |
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Keywords: | conservation in the Anthropocene human–wildlife interaction human–wildlife conflict human–wildlife coexistence animal geographies animal legal theory animal behavior interdisciplinary conservation coexistencia humano-fauna comportamiento animal conflicto humano-fauna conservación en el Antropoceno conservación interdisciplinaria geografía animal interacción humano-fauna teoría legal animal 人类世的保护 人与野生动物互动 人与野生动物冲突 人与野生动物共存 动物地理学 动物法律理论 动物行为 跨学科保护 |
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