Authors

• Mansoureh Hasanzadeh
• Mohammad Kaboli
• Rasoul Khosravi
• Mohsen Ahmadi

Abstract

Inappropriate waste management is considered as an important factor for attracting wild animals to the inhabited area. This leads to food conditioning in some wild species, which changes their feeding behavior and food habits. Usually this trend reduces the fear of wild species and leads to conflict between wild species and human. We sampled five landfill sites of villages and small towns in which wolf attacks have been reported in Hamedan Province. We also sampled five landfill sites far from the centre of recent wolves’ attacks. Each landfill was sampled three times with two days interval. We took three samples, each of them including 0.25 m3 of wastes. The percentage of dry and wet contents along with the amount of protein was compared by independent t-test. Our results revealed that there is no significant difference in waste composition and the amount of protein between the affected and unaffected areas. These results suggest that wastes’ characteristics do not play an important role to enhance the conflict between wolves and human. However, productive agricultural lands, inappropriate waste management, accustoming to waste using and more density of swinger doges, lead to overlap, wolf habitat selection human usage pattern. This could be considered as main reasons of wolf attack in target areas.

Keywords

• Canis lupus
• Food conditioning
• Hamedan province
• Waste composition
• Wolf