Human-Wildlife conflict

The human-wildlife conflict is an issue that refers to the negative impacts that resulted from interaction between wild animals and human, where the negative impacts is on the human resources, or wild animals, or their habitat.

Source: Mail Online

Source: Mail Online

There is definitely a conflict between the interests of human and the interests of wildlife. In the case of the Sun bear, the declination of their own habitat for humans to have more land for plantation will cause the sun bears to go to the nearby crops and plantations to get food as their food sources are diminishing along with their habitat. Yet, the crops and plantations are required for the villagers to sustain themselves as these crops and plantations are their source of food and livelihood.

There are 3 type of human-animal relationships:

  1. Mutualistic: Both the human and animal benefit in different ways from the relationship
  2. Parasitic: One party benefited at the cost of  the other party
  3. Commensal: One party benefits while there is no effect on the other
guy and sun bear

Source: Mongabay.com

For this case, the sun bear’s relationship with human is parasitic as usually one will benefit at the cost of the other as seen described above. However, the most idealistic relationship to have is a mutualistic one, which is rather hard, or nearly impossible to achieve without proper intervention.