For projects addressing human–wildlife conflicts, it is important to develop trustful relationships with the stakeholders affected by the conflicts and to acknowledge and understand the conflict from their point of view. The project thus had a strong motivation to closely work together with the farmers and to be part of their community from the beginning in 2001. We therefore established our research stations on farmland in east-central Namibia and regularly visited the farmer meetings. We identified the most important research questions and developed a research design with the farmers. Some farmers reported high livestock losses through cheetahs, others low losses, and accordingly some farmers killed many “problem cheetahs” while others did not kill any cheetahs. Farmers readily pass on their knowledge on how to capture cheetahs with box traps at marking trees of cheetahs. Their motivation was to actively participate in the finding of evidence-based mitigation solutions to reduce their livestock losses and thus increase their economic revenue. Thus, they were open to change their management practices if these practices provided them with a higher benefit than killing cheetahs.
We fitted captured adult cheetahs with GPS collars and detected that males have two spatial tactics (see also our subproject “Spatial ecology and distribution of free-ranging cheetahs”). Males either defend small territories or roam in large stable home ranges (“floaters”) encompassing several territories. The territories are not contiguous with each other but separated by a surrounding matrix. For more details see sub-project on spatial ecology. The core areas of the territories contain several marking trees, which function as communication hubs (CHs). The CHs represent an area in which territorial male spend 50% of their time and are separated by a distance of ~23 km from each other. Territorial males visit the CHs frequently to mark the trees, while floaters and females visit them to sniff at the markings and only rarely mark there.
Because CHs are important locations for cheetah information exchange, they contain high local densities of cheetahs. This in turn means that these areas represent high predation risks for livestock and therefore are hotspots for livestock losses. Farmer who unwittingly keep their cattle calf in the CHs/hotspots had indeed high losses, whereas farmers who kept their breeding herds in the surrounding matrix had low losses. Based on this discovery, we shifted experimentally breeding herds away from CHs/hotspots and observed that cheetahs do not follow the breeding herds. Instead, they fed on wildlife species available in the CHs such as hartebeest and warthogs. We realized that shifting the breeding herds away from the CHs/hotspots is a sustainable solution to the long-lasting farmer-cheetah conflict in Namibia. This meant that there are actually “problem areas” rather than “problem cheetahs”.
Over the years we identified for several hundred farmers safe and unsafe areas for their breeding herds and developed with them management grazing schemes for their herds. A farm in central Namibia has an average size of 45 km2, and 30% of farms had an overlap with a CHs. Few farms had an overlap with a CHs of more than 50% of their land, mostly the overlap was lower than 20%. The developed management schemes reduced livestock predation by cheetahs by 86%, and remained low over many years. This is because cheetah territories and thus also the predation risk within CHs remain stable over time, since new territory holders hardly shifted the borders. Livestock losses did not fall to zero, some were due to females that roam with their offspring widely in the surrounding matrix. The success, though, of shifting breeding herds out of the cheetah hotspots was so convincing to the farmers that the killing of cheetahs has drop substantially.
Read more about the collaboration with farmers in central Namibia for this sub-project in our page on the “real-world laboratory”.
Publications reporting on these topics
Melzheimer J, Heinrich SK, Wasiolka B, Mueller R, Thalwitzer S, Palmegiani I, Weigold A, Portas R, Roeder R, Krofel M, Hofer H, Wachter B (2020): Communication hubs of an asocial cat are the source of a human-carnivore conflict and key to its solution. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002487117Johnson S, Marker L, Mengersen K, Gordon CH, Melzheimer J, Schmidt-Küntzel A, Nghikembua M, Fabiano E, Henghali J, Wachter B 2013: Modelling the viability of the free-ranging cheetah population in Namibia - an Object Oriented Bayesian Network Approach. Ecosphere 4(7): 90. Doi: 10.1890/ES12-00357.1.Potgieter GC, Weise FJ, Wachter B, Melzheimer J, Wiesel I, Stratford K 2017: Comment on Rust et al.: Human-carnivore conflict in Namibia is not simply about black and white. Society & Natural Resources. Doi: 10.1080/08941920.2017.1283077.Frigerio D, Pipek P, Kimmig S, Winter S, Melzheimer J, Diblíková L, Wachter B, Richter A 2018: Citizen Science and wildlife biology: Synergies and challenges. Ethology 124: 365-377. Doi: 10.1111/eth12746.