Beliefs, Not Livestock Losses, Drive Villager Attitudes Toward Iran’s Big Carnivores

In the villages that ring Golestan National Park in northeastern Iran, the Persian leopard, grey wolf, and brown bear are not abstract conservation icons. They are neighbors that occasionally kill sheep and goats, raid orchards, and shatter beehives. For decades, conservationists have assumed that the surest way to win local hearts for these predators is to reduce the material damage they cause. A new study published in the journal Ambio challenges that assumption with unusual statistical rigor, showing that what people believe about carnivores matters far more than what carnivores actually take from them.

The research, led by Kat Douglas of Georg-August-Universität Göttingen together with Zahra Ebrahimi Monfared, Seyedhamed Mirkarimi, Adrian Paterson, and Mahmood Soofi, drew on face-to-face interviews with 292 residents across 30 villages lying within five kilometers of the park boundary. Interviews were conducted between April and November 2022 by two local field researchers, one male and one female, with 71 percent conducted in Turkmen and the remainder in Farsi. Respondents included livestock herders, crop farmers, beekeepers, teachers, and freelancers, reflecting the mixed livelihoods of a landscape where Turks, Kurds, Fars, Baluch, and Sistani communities live alongside some of Iran’s most threatened mammals.

Golestan National Park is a fitting laboratory for such questions. Established in 1957 as Iran’s first biosphere reserve, it covers roughly 91,895 hectares and rises from 450 to 2,411 meters, encompassing Hyrcanian temperate forest, steppe, and semi-arid habitats. The park shelters urial, bezoar goats, red deer, and roe deer, and with them the leopards, wolves, and bears that prey on them or, in the bear’s case, raid the crops and hives of surrounding farms. As human populations and agriculture have expanded through the Hyrcanian forests, negative interactions have intensified, and retaliatory or precautionary killing of carnivores remains a common response to livestock loss.

What sets this study apart is its analytical framework. Rather than treating attitudes as a simple product of economic damage, the team used Bayesian structural equation modelling, a statistical technique capable of estimating multiple direct and indirect pathways simultaneously among latent constructs such as beliefs, norms, and attitudes that cannot be measured directly. The workflow proceeded in two steps: first a confirmatory factor analysis verified that survey items reliably measured their intended constructs, with all retained items loading above 0.40 and reliability coefficients such as McDonald’s omega ranging from 0.78 to 0.83; then a structural model tested how cognitive beliefs, social beliefs, perceived management responsibility, and livestock loss shaped attitudes toward each species separately.

The headline finding is strikingly consistent. Across all three species, cognitive beliefs, the individual’s evaluations, knowledge, and perceptions of carnivores, emerged as the strongest and most reliable predictor of attitudes. For bears the standardized path coefficient reached negative 0.72, for wolves negative 0.63, and for leopards negative 0.48, with 95 percent Bayesian credible intervals that excluded zero in every case. Respondents who felt carnivore conservation was unimportant, or who believed that any carnivore attacking livestock should be killed, held markedly more negative attitudes overall. In other words, the mind, not the wallet, appears to be the primary battleground of coexistence.

Social beliefs, the expectations of family and fellow villagers about retaliatory killing, also pushed attitudes in a negative direction, though their direct effect was weaker and, in the leopard model, the credible interval overlapped zero. More intriguingly, social beliefs were positively associated with cognitive beliefs in all three models, suggesting that when peers endorse killing carnivores, individuals’ own perceptions of carnivores as dangerous are amplified. The authors caution that social desirability bias, in which respondents answer as they believe their community expects, may partly shape such patterns, a well-known hazard of attitudinal surveys. Even so, the indirect pathway points to a clear lever: shifting community-level norms could ripple through individual belief systems and soften attitudes toward predators.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive result concerns livestock loss itself. Included as an observed variable in the leopard and wolf models, it showed only a weak, statistically uncertain relationship with attitudes, with coefficients near zero and credible intervals spanning zero. Reducing the material costs of coexistence, while still vital for household welfare, appears insufficient on its own to change how people feel about carnivores. The bear model dropped livestock loss entirely, a logical choice given that brown bears in northern Iran mainly raid orchards and beehives; one study found 44 percent of negative interactions involved orchards and 32 percent beehives, against just 13 percent livestock attacks. Notably, human-caused mortality records from Iran between 1980 and 2021 show bears were killed more often than wolves or leopards, but chiefly over threats to human life and crops rather than depredation of herds.

Perceived management responsibility added another layer of nuance. The belief that government should capture and relocate carnivores after an attack was associated with more positive attitudes, an effect that was statistically credible for leopards and wolves, though modest in magnitude. Yet in the wolf and bear models this same variable correlated with more negative cognitive beliefs, hinting that institutional expectations and personal belief systems operate somewhat independently. The context matters: in Iran, compensation schemes for wildlife damage are widely described as bureaucratic and rare, and the survey confirmed this, with only 1.7 percent of respondents, five people, reporting ever receiving compensation. Post-attack support limited by funding and paperwork is known to contribute to illegal retaliation.

Several hypothesized drivers refused to stay in the models. Emotions such as fear, pride, and happiness were removed after destabilizing the analysis, though exploratory estimates hinted that positive emotions favored positive attitudes. The authors suspect social desirability bias may be at play, since roughly half of respondents reported minimal fear of leopards, wolves, or bears, a pattern that could reflect genuine tolerance or reluctance to appear afraid. Demographics including age, gender, ethnicity, literacy, and occupation were also excluded, as were legal and participatory variables, the latter perhaps reflecting the fragmented legal framework surrounding conservation in Iran. Women were underrepresented at 16 percent of the sample, a limitation rooted in cultural barriers rather than sampling design, and the authors acknowledge that the final models were deliberately simple, with two items per construct.

The practical implications reach well beyond Golestan. Because cognitive beliefs dominate attitude formation, education programs that explain the ecological role of carnivores, recalibrate perceived danger toward realistic risk, and teach practical protection, from electric fencing and guardian dogs to fox lights and other non-lethal deterrents, may do more for coexistence than compensation checks alone. Because social norms feed individual beliefs, community-wide engagement rather than one-on-one persuasion is likely to be decisive. And because trust in management shapes attitudes, transparent, participatory governance deserves a place alongside any mitigation toolkit. The authors emphasize that their findings are local in origin but plausibly generalizable in mechanism, since belief systems, social norms, and institutional perceptions recur across human-carnivore contexts worldwide. Coexistence, this study suggests, is negotiated less in pastures and orchards than in the shared beliefs of the people who live there.

Subject of Research: Local community attitudes toward large carnivores around Golestan National Park, Iran

Article Title: Claws, consequences and coexistence: Local community attitudes toward large carnivores in mountain landscapes

Article References: Douglas, K., Monfared, Z. E., Mirkarimi, S., Paterson, A., & Soofi, M. (2026). Claws, consequences and coexistence: Local community attitudes toward large carnivores in mountain landscapes. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02486-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02486-9

Keywords: large carnivores, human-wildlife coexistence, Persian leopard, grey wolf, brown bear, Golestan National Park, conservation psychology, Bayesian structural equation modelling, social norms, cognitive beliefs, livestock depredation, Iran