Conservation of large carnivores is entwined into wider socioeconomic, emotional and political contexts. Return of these species to the areas from which they disappeared in the past also brings considerable social challenges since the fundamental conflicts that caused persecution in the past never went away. As an alternative to top-down management, we are suggesting the use of collaborative approaches that help build trust and establish sustainable coexistence with large carnivores and are also inherently more democratic. For these approaches, results of public attitudes surveys can provide the voice of the “silent majority” and help the managers in more efficient forming of solutions. In Croatia, for wolf we documented a shift in attitudes between 1999 and 2003 from extremes (positive and negative) towards more neutral. Negative attitudes, which developed particularly in older cohorts primarily because of a top-down total protection of the wolf at the end of the 1990s, started to wind down by the second survey despite the wolf population increase. Fort the brown bear we documented the attitudes of the general public and key interest groups in 2002 and 2008. While value orientations and support for species conservation remained the same, there was a decrease in brown bear acceptance capacity, probably because of a population increase and more centralized management. In Albania and Northern Macedonia, we explored public attitudes towards all three large carnivores. Support for wolf conservation is in both countries much lower than support for conservation of brown bear and Eurasian lynx. This indicates that the species need to be treated separately in conservation and management since common measures for all three species could cause the negative attitudes towards wolves to transfer also to the other two species.
|
