The research team surveyed 155 households in Corosha, a community of roughly 250 families in the Bongará Province of Peru’s Amazonas Department, whose territory borders and partially overlaps the Hierba Buena-Allpayacu Private Conservation Area. That protected landscape, spanning montane forests, shrublands and grasslands between 2,000 and 3,000 metres above sea level, shelters species such as the Andean cock-of-the-rock, the puma, the spectacled bear and the endemic yellow-tailed woolly monkey. The survey, conducted in July 2023 with a sample calculated for finite populations at a 95 percent confidence level, achieved an unusually high coverage rate of 62 percent of all families, mitigating the selection bias that often plagues remote fieldwork. Two trained local interviewers independently coded a subset of 30 interviews, achieving an average inter-coder reliability kappa of 0.72, a solid figure for exploratory social research in challenging rural conditions.

The sociodemographic profile that emerged is telling. Respondents averaged 39.3 years of age, with households of 3.9 members on average, and women made up 86.4 percent of participants, reflecting their central role in rural Amazonian subsistence agriculture. Agriculture was the primary economic activity for 80 percent of households, and 92.9 percent of families maintained a chacra, the small agricultural plot that anchors Amazonian livelihoods. Tubers dominated the cropping system, grown by 85.4 percent of farming families, followed by sugarcane and maize at 48.6 percent each and beans at 46.5 percent. Two-thirds of farmers visited their plots daily or more often, a level of management intensity that the authors note resembles patterns seen in fruit gardens of Loreto, where frequent visits correlate with higher productivity and fewer pests.

But the chacra is not only a place of crops. In a finding the researchers describe as rarely documented in the literature, 66.7 percent of farmers reported being accompanied by animals, mainly dogs, during their visits to agricultural plots. This practice transforms the chacra into a multi-species meeting ground where domestic and wild animals routinely cross paths. Overall, roughly 80 percent of households kept animals both in their homes and on their plots, with livestock such as cattle and horses concentrated on farm plots while dogs and cats clustered around dwellings. The result is a tripartite interface among humans, livestock and wildlife that conservation biologists have increasingly recognised as a critical, and often overlooked, driver of both conflict and disease transmission.

The health data collected in Corosha underscore how precarious that interface can be. Poultry showed the highest burden of reported disease, affecting 52.9 percent of households that kept them, with outbreaks consistent with Newcastle disease and respiratory infections dominating the reports. Cattle were the second most affected, at 43.6 percent, with tick infestations, internal parasites, fever and, notably, vampire bat bites and suspected bovine rabies among the documented problems. Dogs suffered from distemper, undetermined infections and mange, while pigs, guinea pigs, horses and cats reported lower but non-trivial disease levels. In a region where veterinary services are scarce and sanitary protocols are poorly known, the authors argue, these conditions create ideal circumstances for communicable diseases to persist and circulate at the wildlife-livestock-human boundary, echoing findings from Rondônia, Brazil, where high parasite prevalence in domestic dogs facilitates pathogen spread to livestock and people.

Perhaps the study’s most striking quantitative result concerns predation. Of the 12 documented wildlife hunting events attributed to domestic animals, dogs were responsible for 83.3 percent, a proportion significantly higher than that of cats, which accounted for the remaining 16.7 percent and hunted only parrots. The statistical comparison yielded an odds ratio of 25.0 with a Fisher’s exact test p-value of 0.0033, a robust signal despite the modest number of events. Dog prey ranged widely across the vertebrate spectrum, from parrots and hummingbirds to monkeys, a sloth and a deer. Free-roaming and semi-domestic dogs are increasingly recognised across Amazonia and other tropical regions as significant predators of birds and small mammals, and their activity patterns often overlap with those of vulnerable wildlife, multiplying opportunities for lethal encounters that rarely appear in official conservation statistics.

Wildlife was far from absent in the agricultural landscape itself. The frequency distribution of species observed in chacras was highly skewed, with a chi-square test of 480.84 and p less than 0.001 confirming that sightings were far from homogeneous across taxonomic groups. Agoutis were reported by 70.8 percent of farming families and parrots by 56.3 percent, while primates appeared in 35.4 percent of households’ observations. Carnivores such as the ocelot and vampire bats were rarely seen, at less than 2 percent of families. The authors interpret this as evidence that Corosha’s agricultural mosaic retains substantial ecological value, consistent with broader Amazonian research showing that bird richness in agroforestry systems depends on proximity to forest and that generalist groups such as parrots and rodents thrive even in landscapes with moderately complex vegetation.

Perceptions, however, told a more conflicted story. Negative views of wildlife predominated at 63.2 percent of respondents, driven overwhelmingly by crop damage, which 51.6 percent of all participants cited. Rodents, including the paca and agouti, were the primary villains, implicated by 49.7 percent of respondents, followed by parrots at 33.5 percent. Positive perceptions were rare, at 16.8 percent, and mostly attached to charismatic or culturally significant species such as the Andean bear, the toucan and certain game birds like guans. Monkeys and hummingbirds attracted mixed feelings, blending aesthetic appreciation with practical grievances. Notably, the study detected a significant gender-based disparity in perception patterns, with women reporting more negative and mixed interactions than men, a Fisher’s exact test confirming the difference at p less than 0.05. Since women dominate both farming and household animal care in Corosha, they sit squarely at the front line of human-wildlife friction.

The authors frame these interconnected findings through a One Health lens, the framework that recognises the inseparable health of people, domestic animals and ecosystems. Their recommendations are concrete: participatory crop protection to reduce losses to rodents and parrots without resorting to hunting, community-based animal health programmes offering vaccination and parasite control, and environmental education that highlights the ecological roles of so-called pest species, many of which, like agoutis, are vital seed dispersers supporting forest regeneration. The alternative, the study suggests, is a spiral in which crop losses harden attitudes, attitudes justify retaliation, and retaliation erodes the biodiversity that makes landscapes like Corosha ecologically valuable in the first place.

What makes the Corosha study resonate beyond its mountain valleys is its methodological ambition. Rather than isolating a single conflict species or cataloguing crop damage alone, it connects livelihoods, animal husbandry, predation records and perception data within one analytical frame, revealing how tightly these threads are braided. A dog carried to a chacra is simultaneously a guardian, a disease vector and an unrecognised predator; a parrot is a cultural treasure and a maize thief; a woman tending tubers is a farmer, a wildlife observer and the community’s most reliable witness to all of it. For conservationists seeking sustainable co-existence in the Amazon’s biodiversity hotspots, the message from Corosha is clear: any strategy that ignores domestic animals, gendered labour or local attitudes is likely to fail, while integrated approaches that address all three simultaneously offer the best chance of keeping both farms and forests alive.

Subject of Research: Human–wildlife interactions, domestic animal predation and local perceptions in a rural Peruvian Amazonian community

Article Title: Human–wildlife interactions in a rural Amazonian community: Linking productive land use, domestic animals and local perceptions

Article References: Human–wildlife interactions in a rural Amazonian community: Linking productive land use, domestic animals and local perceptions. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3897/neotropical.21.e178289

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/neotropical.21.e178289

Keywords: human-wildlife conflict, Peruvian Amazon, One Health, domestic dogs, crop damage, subsistence agriculture, wildlife perceptions, animal health, conservation, Corosha, chacras, zoonotic disease