Date: September 8, 2016
Source: Boise State University
The lion may be "king of the
forest," but tigers are bigger, smarter, deadlier and can be found across
an impressive range that includes India, Southeast Asia and Russia. And like
lions, tiger populations are dwindling.
New research by Boise State's
Neil Carter published in the journal Biological Conservation titled
"Gendered perceptions of tigers in Chitwan National Park, Nepal,"
looks at how human perceptions of tigers affect how willing human communities
are to coexist with these large predators, and particularly at how women's
attitudes toward tigers differ from men's.
"Recently the field of
wildlife conservation has focused on human dimensions, but has been lagging
other disciplines in terms of understanding gendered differences in attitudes
and behaviors," he said. "We know that women and men behave
differently, and behaviors have conservation relevance. We wanted to find out
what is driving that difference to help us understand ways to develop better
conservation interventions."
The research was motivated by
three basic challenges:
1. Because they spend more time
in the forest gathering resources, women are at a greater risk then men of a
tiger encounter. 2. Women tend to have more fears in general and more fear of
wildlife in particular. 3. Compared to men, women tend to have less information
and knowledge about conservation and wildlife.
Carter and his co-author Teri
Allendorf of University of Wisconsin-Madison identified a number of ways that
men and women view tigers differently and how these differences might affect
tiger populations in Nepal. Identifying ways to address these challenges is
vital because women have so much influence inside and outside of their
families.
"Women have a lot of
influence on a household as well as on each other," Carter said, noting
their traditional role as nurturers as well as their more social natures.
"They control what information their children access and this strongly impacts
human behavior."
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