Inconsistent human behavior around animals puts wildlife at risk

A computer model suggests that wildlife may face survival problems if some of the humans in the environment help wild animals while others hunt them.

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

Well-intentioned humans could be inadvertently endangering wildlife by being kind and generous, in a world where not all humans are kind and generous.

Wild animals can quickly learn whether humans are trustworthy, based on their own experiences and those of their group members. But different humans act differently toward animals, and these “mixed messages” put animals at risk of trusting the wrong humans, he says. Madeleine Goumas at the University of Exeter, UK.

“When we feed wild animals, for example, we feel good and it’s a selfless thing we’re doing,” she says. “But we don’t know later on if that animal will approach someone who won’t appreciate it as much.”

Unlike other animals, especially predators, humans show very different individual behaviors toward other species, Goumas says. Some people ignore or avoid wild animals; others approach them, feed them or even caress them; and others chase, capture, harm or hunt them. This makes it difficult for animals to know how to act around humans, especially since they can benefit from feeling safe around people while their non-human predators don’t.

Goumas and his colleagues have developed a computer model to assess how wild animals deal with mixed messages sent by humans. The model allows animals to learn information about humans in different ways, learning by observing other animals, for example, and at different speeds. It also allows human populations to contain different mixes of friendly or hostile people, and gives animals different abilities to recognize and remember which humans were which.

The model suggests that animals that quickly learn whether to trust humans may better survive in places where humans generally act the same way, whether they are friendly or hostile toward animals, Goumas says. Transferring those findings to the real world means, for example, that deer can take advantage of more grazing land in urban areas, where people leave them alone or are even friendly with them. Meanwhile, deer that live in wooded areas that are popular with hunters may survive better if they quickly learn to hide from people.

However, the model also suggests that rapid learning in places where different people in the human population have different attitudes toward wild animals can be detrimental, Goumas says. Simulated animals in these environments quickly drew conclusions about all humans based on a single good or bad experience. “We tend to think that ‘fast learning sounds good’ and that it should always be better,” she says. “But the problem is… it can be a bit excessive.”

The model suggests that being able to clearly recognize individual humans as friendly or hostile isn’t always beneficial, Goumas says. That’s because, by learning about each new person individually, rather than generalizing, she says, animals may lose valuable time that would be better spent taking advantage of available resources or fleeing imminent danger.

Still, not all species are capable of individually recognizing humans, although well-intentioned humans sometimes make such dangerous assumptions, Goumas says.

“I’ve seen people on social media say, ‘Oh, it’s okay to feed these animals, because they know me and they wouldn’t go near other people,'” she says. “But you just don’t know. he is putting them [the animals] in a very vulnerable position, especially when we still don’t know much about how animals perceive us.”

Magazine reference: Royal Open Science Society, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.211742