Monkeys in our gardens, leopards in our fields: the role of coexistence in mitigating human-wildlife conflict

Here is a piece I’ve written for the Science In The News FLASH blog on human-animal conflict. This piece went through editing at ComSciCon-Local 2014, and then more editing through FLASH–I hope it shows!

I’ve wanted to learn more about human-animal conflict since I participated in a workshop on the topic at the Students Conference on Conservation Science 2013 in Bangalore, and writing this piece was a fun way of doing that. The issue is obviously a complex one–we spent the whole workshop just trying to understand what we mean by human-animal conflict! Nevertheless, it’s definitely a growing opinion that in at least some situations, learning how to coexist with wildlife might be the best way to mitigate conflict, and that conservation paradigms need to incorporate coexistence.