Throughout history, and all over the world, people have killed wild carnivores to protect their livestock. Now, a relentless expansion of human activities that brings people and their livestock into ever larger areas of former wildlife habitat is rapidly escalating both the threats to carnivore populations and the impact of carnivores on rural people’s liveliehoods. In southern Africa a radically new way to reduce conflict between people and wild carnivores is being developed by the BioBoundary Project of the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust (BPCT, http://www.bpctrust.org/). With funding from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the BioBoundary Project is using the protection of endangered African wild dogs as a test case of whether wild carnivores can be kept away from livestock by artifical scent-mark boundaries between protected wildlife areas and livestock areas. African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) are intensely social super-predators. They live in packs with huge home ranges that extend beyond the boundaries of even the largest of protected areas. When wild dogs cross these boundaries into landscapes that are dominated by humans and livestock they run a gauntlet of shooting, snaring, and poisoning; in most wild dog populations, more dogs are killed by people than by anything else. African wild dogs used to range across 39 sub-Saharan countries but now their numbers have dwindled to fewer than 6,000 and only two populations are large enough to be self-sustaining in the long term. Each African wild dog pack stakes out its territory by soaking patches of soil with the urine of the pack’s alpha pair.Login Or Register To Read Full Story