Factors Predicting Provisioning of Macaques by Humans at Tourist Sites
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Factors Predicting Provisioning of Macaques by Humans at Tourist Sites Asmita Sengupta 1,2 & Sindhu Radhakrishna 2 Received: 17 July 2019 / Accepted: 24 February 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Incidental primate tourism is prevalent in many primate habitat countries. In these scenarios, although the primary motivation of the tourists may not be to interact with primates, they may do so because of the presence of primates in tourist spots. Provisioning of primates is a common behavior that humans engage in at these sites. While several studies have assessed the impact of tourism or provisioning on primates, understanding why humans provision and its sociocultural predictors are primary requirements for designing primate management and/or conservation plans. We assessed these issues using questionnaire surveys at two sites where people provision macaques in India: in Himachal Pradesh and Goa (N = 203). People were driven to feed macaques by the desire to observe them closely, concern over decreasing food resources for wildlife, and religious affinities. The best model for Goa included age, gender, religion, and education as predictors of whether respondents provisioned; people with religious affinities apart from Hinduism were ca. 24 times as likely to provision as Hindus, and respondents with the highest level of education were 54 times as likely to provision as those with the lowest. At Himachal Pradesh, the best model contained religion and education as predictors. The trend was the reverse of that at Goa; people following Hinduism and those with lower education were more likely to provision. Our results show that no singular template is suitable for managing human– primate interactions across sites. We suggest more studies involving diverse sites be conducted to assess region-specific issues for ensuring human–primate coexistence. Keywords Bonnet macaque . Incidental tourism . India provisioning . Resident-tourist .
Rhesus macaque
Handling Editor: Joanna M. Setchell Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-02000148-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Asmita Sengupta [email protected] 1
Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Shriramapura, Jakkur, Bangalore, Karnataka, India
2
National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bangalore, India
A. Sengupta, S. Radhakrishna
Introduction Primate tourism is a form of human–primate interface that has garnered much attention from primatologists (Fuentes et al. 2007). It includes ape tourism that involves safarilike expeditions to remote areas to watch apes in their natural habitats as nonintrusively as possible (Matheson 2017). In many countries across Asia, primate tourism involves the formation of designated “monkey parks” wherein primate ranging is restricted by the strategic placement of feeding stations (Russon and Wallis 2014). In many primate habitat
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