Abstract
Modern wildlife management has dual mandates to reduce human-wildlife conflict (HWC) for burgeoning populations of people while supporting conservation of biodiversity and the ecosystem functions it affords. These opposing goals can sometimes be achieved with non-lethal intervention tools that promote coexistence between people and wildlife. One such tool is conditioned taste aversion (CTA), the application of an evolutionary relevant learning paradigm in which an animal associates a transitory illness to the taste, odor or other characteristic of a particular food item, resulting in a long-term change in its perception of palatability. Despite extensive support for the power of CTA in laboratory studies, field studies have exhibited mixed results, which erodes manager confidence in using this tool. Here we review the literature on CTA in the context of wildlife conservation and management and discuss how success could be increased with more use of learning theory related to CTA, particularly selective association, stimulus salience, stimulus generalization, and extinction of behavior. We apply learning theory to the chronological stages of CTA application in the field and illustrate them by synthesizing and reviewing past applications of CTA in HWC situations. Specifically, we discuss (1) when CTA is suitable, (2) how aversion can be most effectively (and safely) established, (3) how generalization of aversion from treated to untreated food can be stimulated and (4) how extinction of aversion can be avoided. For each question, we offer specific implementation suggestions and methods for achieving them, which we summarize in a decision-support table that might be used by managers to guide their use of CTA across a range of contexts. Additionally, we highlight promising ideas that may further improve the effectiveness of CTA field applications in the future. With this review, we aspire to demonstrate the diverse past applications of CTA as a non-lethal tool in wildlife management and conservation and facilitate greater application and efficacy in the future.
Highlights
The growing prevalence of human-wildlife conflicts is of increasing conservation concern and has invited comprehensive study of intervention methods (Conover, 2002; Eklund et al, 2017; van Eeden et al, 2018) with increasing emphasis on less invasive and non-lethal techniques (e.g., Smith et al, 2000; Shivik et al, 2003; McManus et al, 2015)
Learning theorists have distinguished between two main forms of associative learning; classical and operant and both have been applied to wildlife management
Associative learning has been used when managers expose animals to a chemical added to a particular food or prey to induce nausea and so generate an association between the taste of the food, and an unconditioned stimulus they would naturally avoid (Cowan et al, 2000)
Summary
The growing prevalence of human-wildlife conflicts is of increasing conservation concern and has invited comprehensive study of intervention methods (Conover, 2002; Eklund et al, 2017; van Eeden et al, 2018) with increasing emphasis on less invasive and non-lethal techniques (e.g., Smith et al, 2000; Shivik et al, 2003; McManus et al, 2015). Relevant meta-data included: DOI, source (systematic search or ad hoc retrieval), country of study, species, HWC category (e.g., livestock predation), lab or field experiment, number of individuals, study design, the (food) resource used for conditioning, the illness-inducing substance, substance application method, novelty of the (food) resource, and the outcome measure. This is typically easier to achieve when humans partially control the presentation of food items, such as in agriculture, certain protected breeding populations, or baiting projects This may explain why, far, supporting stimuli have been added only in
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