Understanding the coexistence between carnivores and people: PhD thesis finally available online!


On this Valentine's Day, I thought I would share my love of carnivores with you. I spent the last 3 years studying carnivore conservation in Namibia and specifically the factors that affected tolerance towards these species by livestock farmers. My thesis is finally available online, so if you're mad enough to want to have a read, here's the link!


More than happy to receive comments, questions, criticisms, hate mail, cookies etc. on it - please fire away!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We need to revolutionise academia - and here's how we can do it

It’s high time us academics took a step back from navel-gazing just for a second to really glance up and around us. At present, we can’t see the wood for the trees. We’re too busy chasing that next grant, boosting our citations and writing that next journal article to reflect on what we’ve become. So what are we? Simply, we have become money-making machines for universities and journals. We are no longer here to teach students, to improve society or to make the world a better place. We have become commoditised by the exploitative incentive system within academia that only promotes you if you bring in cash. For some sickening, potentially neo-liberal reason, we have forgotten why we are all here in the first place. To create positive change. We have been confused and misguided by the amorphous “Faculty” and lured into paying exorbitant fees to publish our work, despite practically every other professional writing careerist actually being paid to write. Somehow, we have forgotten th...
More Big Cat Tails »

Building pride: female empowerment helps women & lions

Image
Reposted from my BBC article . A male-dominated culture has meant that Samburu women rarely get a say in how their society handles big cats, but one project is trying to change that Lionesses have a lot of power in lion society. The females typically work together to hunt down prey, and form crèches to look after their cubs. This cooperative behaviour brings in lots of food, and ensure that plenty of lion cubs survive to adulthood. The female lions' empowerment stands in stark contrast to the human societies that live alongside the lions in Kenya's Samburu National Reserve. There, as in many other cultures throughout history, women have been discouraged from taking control – in part due to a male-dominated culture. As it happens, lions – despite the lionesses' efforts – are  vulnerable to extinction . So what might happen if we took a leaf out of the lions' book and began to allow women to make more decisions? One Kenyan lion conservation organisation, Ew...
More Big Cat Tails »

Quantity does not always mean quality

Image
I'm excited to announce that our new journal article on qualitative methods for conservation has been published in Society & Natural Resources! Here we talk about the quantitative / qualitative divide in conservation and explain the importance of appreciating the benefits of qualitative studies when trying to understand complex, under-researched areas. Most conservation studies are quantitative in nature. They use numbers, percentages, statistics and modelling to empirically test predefined hypotheses. Whilst there is merit in this approach when you already know a fair amount about a topic, it's unhelpful when studying a new subject - or when you want to challenge conventional thinking. That's where qualitative methods come in Qualitative methods are exploratory in nature, where the goal is dive deeply into a specific topic to garner as much information as possible about it. Hypotheses are not usually used here because the researcher doesn't want to start ...
More Big Cat Tails »