Commentary: Wildlife Tourism as Crop Protection? Double-goal Provisioning and the Transvaluation of the Macaque in Postwar Japan

Human–wildlife interfaces are often sites of friction and conflict in the form of crop and livestock depredations that can lead to negative local attitudes towards the animals responsible. This paper examines the use of provisioning to reduce wildlife damage through diversion (‘diversionary feeding’) and to display the diverted animals for tourism. It focuses on a macaque (Macaca fuscata) provisioning initiative from the municipality of Ōita in western Japan that set out to achieve these two objectives of crop protection and tourism. Provisioning succeeded in establishing the macaques as a popular tourist attraction, but it has been far less effective in keeping farmland safe from crop-raiding. Owing mainly to macaque population increase and habituation, the early diversion effect waned and crop-raiding re-emerged as a problem. The Ōita vision of double-goal provisioning has proved to be flawed and the compatibility of diversionary provisioning with wildlife tourism highly questionable.

Abstract licence: CC BY

A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.