Ecotourism, Negative Charisma, and Preservation of Predators: The Case of South American Jaguars & the anti-depredation approach.

Ecotourism, Negative Charisma, and Preservation of Predators: The Case of South American Jaguars & the anti-depredation approach.
An article by Tortato et al. in Global Ecology and Conservation journal (July 2017) provides an assessment of the value of jaguar tourism in the Brazilian Pantanal.  Jaguar tourism in the area is relatively recent but apparently is growing—the area is cited by the authors as “the most important wildlife tourism epicenter in Latin America” and, they state, comparable to parks in Africa.  However, illegal hunting is “the main threat” to the jaguar population. The article is based on interviews with owners of 7 lodges based on jaguar tourism and calculates the profits to these lodges as being 56 times as great as the cost of the livestock the jaguars plunder. Thus they propose that those profiting from ecotourism could reimburse the ranchers losing livestock with plenty of profits to spare. They cite survey data that many tourists would be willing to pay extra money to support the compensation scheme. However, they also point out that differentiation should be made between those ranchers that take “anti-depredation measures” so that those adopting preventive steps should be reimbursed at a higher rate for their losses. In my Wildlife Politics book (see Chapter 5 and elsewhere), I discuss compensation schemes used in the U.S. (once the Defenders of Wildlife group was renowned for their reimbursements for losses due to wolves) and elsewhere and, the curious finding was that many ranchers even those who accepted payments disliked the system for various reasons—often they claimed that payments were beset by red tape, took too long, and did not reimburse them for all of their losses—only a small portion could be verified. The basic movement has been to tie the payments to preventive measures as this article proposes for jaguars in South America. Unfortunately, losses to ranchers due to predators seems to engender a resentment and hatred in many of them that goes beyond rational financial calculations but represents what I characterize in my book as “negative charisma.”  I use the term negative charisma to refer to the deeply emotional, non-rational hatred of wildlife that is felt by ranchers and others (e.g., hunters who see them as competitors) that goes beyond rationality.  Indeed, the theme of my Wildlife Politics book is that wildlife politics results from the fact that a large portion of humanity has strong emotional attachments to wildlife, both positive and negative, that often emerges into political controversy throughout the world. The jaguar article is available from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989417300501