Patterns of livestock depredation and human-wildlife conflict in Misgar valley of Hunza, Pakistan
Abstract Predators can cause a significant economic damage though preyed on livestock. These conflicts prompt a negative attitude towards their conservation and also leads towards retaliatory killing. Here we composed data from 100 household on livestock using a semi-structured questionnaire survey from 2014 to 2019 on livestock population, depredation patterns, predation count and conservation approaches. The poison regression model showed significant increasesd of predation count at P<0.05 among 22 influential factors such as age , gender, occupation, education of respondent, estimated population of predators, threats index for predators and conservation. A total of 364 out of 9270 livestock damaged by predators and non-predatory factors during the last six years. Among them 168 (1.81 %) attributed by wolf, 142 (1.53 %) by snow leopard and 54 (0.58%) by non-predatory factors. Our results showed an increase of 11 % in the overall population and an average of 60 animals were preyed by predators and non-predatory factors each year. The foremost threat to the mammalian predator was retaliatory killing. The guarded grazing and construction of predator-proof corral pens were identified to protect the domestic livestock predation by wolf and snow leopard respectively. This study specifies measures of conservation to minimize human-carnivore conflicts.