HUMAN WILDLIFE CONFLICT RESPONSE

Our team has a lot of respect in the forest edge communities they patrol in and recently there has been a spate of calls from different villages, asking for help with human-wildlife conflict events. The first was a Malayan sun bear that entered a privately owned rubber plantation that is planted up against the Gunung Leuser National Park (i.e no buffer between the forest and the plantation). The bear/s damaged several trees while looking for termites and grubs and locals retaliated out of fear by setting a leg-hold trap. Ranger Jasson explains here

More recently, our team has responded to multiple Sumatran tiger conflict events in a different community along the forest edge. Here, many locals have cows that are free to roam the plantations and forest edge, making them easy pickings for tigers coming out of the protected forest. We have started a predator compensation scheme in response to these recent events and have partially compensated two locals for the death of one cow and fatal injury of another due to Sumatran tiger predation. We will be working more closely with this community to help provide long term solutions and other community support. You can see some of team helping to drive the tiger away here

Below are some images of the recent events, taken by our patrol team who also double as a human wildlife conflict response team.