INTRODUCTION

The human–wildlife conflict is a face-off between people and wildlife over space or resources. Typically, conflict involves wildlife that consumes pasture or crops, or attacks domestic stock or even humans – and people who kill wildlife in reprisal (Woodroffe et al., Chapter 1, Thirgood et al., Chapter 2). For humans, the conflict is shrinking as a dwindling proportion of people encounter wildlife. For wildlife, the reverse is true. With between a third and a half of all land transformed and used by humans (Vitousek et al. 1997), natural habitats are shrinking. A growing proportion of wildlife competes with people and survives only through conservation measures.

The term ‘wildlife’ originally referred to large or conspicuous animals. Over the last century, however, the term has come to include a wider variety of species as our sensibilities have broadened from parochial to universal human rights, and recently to the intrinsic value of life as a whole (Nash 1989). The scope of conservation has grown in lockstep, from its origins in sport hunting to wildlife conservation and more recently to conservation of all life forms (Shabecoff 1993). Today most nations are revising their policies and legislation to reflect the global aims of the Convention on Biological Diversity (Heywood 1995; Hempel 1996; Convention on Biological Diversity 2005). Seen in this light, human–wildlife conflict should apply to any species competing with human interests of any sort.

Expanding human–wildlife conflict to human–biodiversity conflict would not be problematic if we valued all species the same.