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When journalist Srinath Perur was in southern India speaking with farmers whose crops had been destroyed by elephants, he discovered the story had a surprising twist.

Farmers with means had put up electric fences to keep elephants from tromping through their plots. So, the elephants wound up feeding off the crops of farmers who couldn’t afford this layer of protection. The incident confirmed a truism Perur had recently heard from a researcher: “Often when you’re talking about human-animal conflict, we actually mean human-human conflict,” says Perur, who covered competition between Asian elephants and humans in National Geographic’s May 2023 issue.

Wildlife stories are among the most captivating science journalism has to offer. Images of safari vehicles interrupting cheetahs’ kills or whales overturning boats go viral. But these photos don’t tell the whole story. Media sometimes portray such encounters as freak accidents or one-off spectacles—as if human encroachment had nothing to do with them. Too often, journalists overlook the context surrounding these interactions in their reporting.

That’s one of several lessons I’ve learned over the past seven years of reporting stories on human-wildlife coexistence, often called human-wildlife conflict, including pieces on elephants navigating infrastructure and how human activity is helping mosquitoes spread deadly diseases across the globe. Just as Perur learned, I’ve often seen that most human-wildlife interactions begin with the humans, not the other way around. As climate change, globalization, trade, mining, population growth, deforestation, and other forces put humans and wildlife into ever more frequent contact, reporters must work to highlight the underlying causes of these interactions, tamp down unnecessary hype, and seek the input of local experts.

Get to the Root of Human-Wildlife Conflict

Journalists reporting on clashes between humans and wildlife should do more than just cover individual encounters. “In general, journalists only report stories about some dramatic incident where somebody got injured or an animal got killed,” says Kenyan ecologist and documentary filmmaker Paula Kahumbu. Exploring the factors underlying these events—human-driven or otherwise—adds important context to wildlife stories.

Climate change and its downstream effects are often a major component of human-wildlife conflict. An increasingly unstable climate contributes to resource scarcity, shifts the behaviors and migrations of both humans and animals, and increases the likelihood that they’ll cross paths, researchers found in a February 2023 study. As you report a story, consider how the issue at hand might stem from climate change–related effects, including increasing temperatures or extreme weather events, such as drought or unseasonable rainfall. “We’ve been anthropocentric in talking [about] problems,” Perur says, “even problems that we’ve created—climate change, how we’ve displaced animals from their habitat.”

Some conflicts can be tied even more closely to human activity. “The larger forces at play could be business interests, or legal ones, or corruption,” says science journalist Elham Shabahat. “It’s sometimes as simple as just money.” In a 2021 series for Hakai Magazine, Shabahat dove into how deep-sea mining leads to increased interaction between humans and marine life, disrupting entire ecosystems, from seafloor dwelling sponges and mollusks to commercial tuna fisheries. When you’re searching for the source of human-wildlife conflict, it helps to figure out who stands to profit, she says.

Frequently, the forces behind human-animal interactions are complex and intertwined. For example, while reporting a January 2021 story on the outsized number of people being killed or injured by hippos on a lake in central Kenya, I found that several interacting factors were contributing to these incidents. Unusually high rainfall in the region had caused the lake to rise and fish populations to boom, attracting fishermen. The number of fishermen had increased too, as Kenyan flower farm workers laid off in the wake of COVID-19 turned to fishing. And the lake’s hippo population had also risen—their pathways to other areas cut off by nearby fences and houses.

Getting to the bottom of human-wildlife interactions also involves understanding how wild animals behave when humans and other factors aren’t involved. In my hippo story, for example, I explained that they are docile herbivores that usually attack only when startled. Including the baseline of animal activity puts stories about their erratic behavior into context.

Without this context, journalists can inadvertently exaggerate wildlife stories. In 2016, for example, international media outlets ran headlines that lions had “escaped” from Kenya’s Nairobi National Park and then reported that they had been “recaptured.” In fact, the lions were never captive to begin with. The partially unfenced park abuts the rapidly growing capital city. These lions, as I noted in a 2016 story for National Geographic, were simply “walking along a migratory route lions and other animals have used for decades.”

Go Beyond the Human vs. Wildlife Binary

Not every human-wildlife story needs to center on competition between the two. “As journalists we have a natural tendency to gravitate toward conflict,” Shabahat says. It’s crucial not to fall into the trap of splitting humans and animals into protagonists and antagonists. “It’s our jobs as journalists to complicate the narrative,” she says.

The human vs. wildlife framing reinforces the false narrative that animals are always to blame when their interactions with humans go south—and that humans are often the victims. “There’s less empathy toward the animals and more empathy toward the humans,” Kahumbu says.

Pitting humans and animals against each other also ignores deeper issues at play, according to Shabahat. When she started reporting on encounters between humans and gorillas in Rwanda, for example, she found that “a lot of the coverage was very superficial.” In reality, “there are larger problems that both humans and wildlife face together,” she says. In her 2018 story for Mongabay, Shabahat covered how climate change–induced droughts are leading humans deeper into gorilla-inhabited forests in search of water, and gorillas facing dwindling food sources are turning to farmers’ crops.

Another way journalists can add depth to their wildlife narratives is by dissecting the complex human issues involved. “I love animals, but to be honest, I don’t want to read a book about animals for 300 pages. It’s human stories that humans find compelling,” wildlife journalist Rachel Nuwer told Eric R Olson, host of the podcast Sciencentric, in 2018. In her book published in the same year, Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking, and other work, such as her coverage of the donkey skin trade threatening to spread infectious diseases, Nuwer highlights how wildlife trafficking can harm humans, too.

Journalists can also avoid language that sensationalizes a human-animal interaction or needlessly paints humans as victims. Wildlife coverage often includes hyperbolic human-centric language to characterize animal behavior. A surfboard-stealing sea otter is described as a “terrorist,” for example, or a grizzly bear, “a creature that spends its life killing.”

Christine Dell’Amore, who writes, assigns, and edits wildlife stories for National Geographic, worked to counter this type of narrative in the magazine’s coverage of the invasive Jorō spider’s spread across the eastern U.S. Other media outlets ran headlines calling the spiders dangerous and terrifying, she says. Yes, these East Asia–native spiders are large, neon-yellow and spin sprawling webs, but there’s no evidence that they’re harmful, Dell’Amore’s team reported in March 2022.

To avoid unnecessary hype in wildlife stories, ask scientists what language they use, Dell’Amore suggests. Instead of saying attack, “shark biologists prefer the term bite,” for instance. For much of the public, “the knee jerk reaction is to be afraid,” she says, “so as wildlife journalists, our responsibility is to try and reduce that fear.”

 

Consult Local Sources

Journalists can also improve their wildlife coverage by vetting their understanding with local experts on the ground and featuring their perspectives in stories. “Journalists tend to go to the people they most closely relate to,” Kahumbu says. “American journalists go to their American friends first, and you see the same spokespeople for wildlife being repeatedly used again and again.”

Experts, community members, and journalists native to an area can challenge false narratives, reveal important context, and provide valuable first-person perspectives in wildlife stories. “The story has to come from the people on the ground,” says Kahumbu, whose TV series Wildlife Warriors follows African conservation experts as well as local farmers and herders who find themselves and their homes on the front lines of human-wildlife conflict.

Interviewing local sources gives journalists a richer understanding of a community, so they’re “not just parachuting in for a week or two,” Dell’Amore says. “It’s our job as journalists to represent other parts of the world.” Hire translators or interpreters to overcome language barriers—or, better yet, editors can seek out local journalists who already know the language and the community being covered.

Take, for example, the case of Alvin Kaunda, the Kenyan “elephant reporter” who made international headlines in 2022. Kaunda was on location at an elephant orphanage covering the effects of drought conditions on local wildlife for the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC), when a young elephant started curiously poking and prodding his face mid-broadcast. Kaunda maintained his composure at first before falling into a fit of giggles. The video spot—aside from just being a delightful watch—counters the belief some Kenyans hold that only white foreigners care about wildlife. “Seeing a Black Kenyan laughing and giggling and interacting with an elephant was a surprise to Kenyans and reached millions of viewers around the world,” Kahumbu says. (Kaunda now covers the wildlife beat at KBC.)

Getting local perspectives can also help journalists highlight stories where conservation efforts are working and human-wildlife coexistence is succeeding. “Very few journalists acknowledge that Africa and countries like Kenya have maintained and sustained extraordinary amounts of wildlife and biodiversity,” Kahumbu says. “Africa still has chimpanzees, lions, all these elephants, and they still exist largely outside of protected areas.”

This coexistence is often thanks to local solutions. In Kenya, for example, local initiatives to install lights near livestock pens have helped deter lions from encroaching and killing the animals—and thereby coming into conflict with humans. But reporting often centers on places where such measures don’t yet exist. “We hear, ‘six lions were killed for attacking and killing a man’s 10 goats,’” Kahumbu says. “That little story is taken out of the much bigger picture.” Other solutions stem from existing local knowledge, which is often left out of coverage, Perur says. For example, in some parts of the Himalayas, people sing loudly at certain times of day as they walk to avoid startling bears.

Stories that feature problem-solving and positive change resonate with readers, Dell’Amore says. “A lot of the stories we run are very depressing,” she says. “But our readers respond well to hearing about solutions—they want to know what they can do and what the glimmers of hope are, so we’re not coming away from the story feeling totally despondent.”

Jacob Kushner is an international journalist who writes about science, wildlife, and global health for outlets such as National Geographic, BBC, New Scientist, and The Atlantic. His recent BBC Future series Stopping the Next One, was a finalist for the 2021 Online Journalism Awards. He teaches international reporting and migration at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His forthcoming book, Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants, will be published in May 2024 by Grand Central (Hachette). Follow him on X at @JacobKushner.