Human-Wildlife Conflict Quotes

Hippos kill more people in Africa annually than any other wild animal.

In Tanzania, the chimps are isolated in a very tiny patch of forest. I flew over it 13 years ago and realized that, basically, all the trees had gone, that people all around the park are struggling to survive. It became very clear that there was no way to protect the chimps while the people were in this dire circumstance.

Predators make it much more difficult to find consensus. It's a lot easier to agree about birds and plants than about animals that endanger people and livestock.

Most Europeans have no idea how wild life can be in north America.

Last night, we did the Threatdown -- God, it's hard to even talk about this -- and for the first time, I didn't mention bears. It's winter, they're asleep, I didn't think it would be a problem. But today I see this in the Toronto Globe and Mail -- apparently a 700-pound polar bear showed up at a children's hockey game. I've said this before, they're after our kids -- they're tender, juicy, you don't even have to throw away the bones.

Elephants seek food elsewhere if their route is blocked, and raiding crops and grain stores brings them into conflict with people, often resulting in deaths on both sides.

Apex predators are good for an environment in terms of biodiversity and trophic cascade - we have very few. But realistically, only a few areas could sustain free-roaming wolves in Britain, mostly in Scotland.

The Parc des Volcans in Rwanda, where I conduct most of my studies, is heavily infested with poachers and herdsmen, whose cattle graze right through my camp area. Park boundaries have no meaning to these tribesmen.

Grizzly bears eat people without the benefit of music.

I'm learning that human pressure on wildlife is becoming increasingly dangerous. You've got to be more alert because more animals have been pushed around, wounded, subjected to human harassment, ambushed, all kinds of stress. When they attack, it's totally predictable.

So, my tactic with conservation of apex predators is to get people excited and take them to where they live.

And so in 1975, the grizzly bear was put on, as I said - on the endangered species list as threatened. And new measures were taken, for instance, bear-proofing garbage, creating new regulations to - essentially to try and keep people and people's food away from the bears, let the bears adjust to eating the abundant wild food that's available in Yellowstone and allow them to be more wild, to be independent of humans as sources of foods for the good of both sides. And that has been quite successful.

It does seem like, in the world today, we've moved further and further away from wildlife. There's that sense of whatever you're scared of, you just want it to go away. Here in Australia Zoo, part of our ongoing plan is that re-connection.

It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.

Are people more important than the grizzly bear? Only from the point of view of some people.

So the lion is the law-breaker. Just as to the primitive man the lion is the lawbreaker, the great nuisance, dangerous to human beings and to animals, that breaks into the Kraal at night and fetches the bull out of the herd: he is the destructive instinct.

It's Earth Day today. Let me tell you something about polar bears. They're endangered but you have to be careful because a polar bear is one of the few animals that will stalk a human. If you go to where polar bears live, it might stalk you and when you're on the plane going home, it might be behind you reading.

We use our tax dollars to pay some bureaucrat to kill a mountain lion, dig a hole and bury this precious beast. No one gets to eat it, nobody gets to buy licenses, fees and taxes themselves. And that's only after a mountain lion has killed somebody! Oh my God! And the Osbournes are still No. 1!

The threat of extinction is more real than many realise. And the damage done to elephants directly leads to destruction of the ecosystem.

Human relationships with predators have always been thorny. Predators are the first creatures our kind purposely eradicates. Too often, people feel humans are and should be in control; we are enraged to discover this is not true. And when other creatures share our appetites and kill our livestock (often animals we were raising to kill, ourselves), we call them vandals and murderers...Predators are the most persecuted creatures on Earth.

Earlier, 100,000 elephants lived in Kenya and we didn't have any noteworthy problem with it. The problem that we have is not that there are now more elephants.

In real life, wolves will do anything to avoid contact with mankind.

In October 2014, for the first time in almost three-quarters of a century, a gray wolf was seen loping along the forested North Rim of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona. She had walked hundreds of miles, probably from Wyoming or Idaho.

Historically, grizzlies ranged from Alaska to Mexico, with at least 50,000 bears living in the western half of the contiguous United States. With European colonization, the bears were shot, poisoned, and trapped to the brink of extinction.

The grizzly bears that live in and around Yellowstone make up almost half the population in the lower 48 states, and now those bears are at risk.