Putting yourself in an animal's shoes - empathy and intangible benefits drive tolerance towards wildlife in Namibian communal conservancies

Many wildlife species are threatened due to persecution and intolerance of people to sharing landscapes with them, especially in mixed use landscapes where both people and wildlife struggle to thrive together. Understanding the factors that promote human tolerance is therefore critical, but progress is hindered by a lack systematic syntheses of studies. The Wildlife Tolerance Model (WTM) is one attempt to provide a framework based on a systematic synthesis of the large body of work in this field. Here we apply the WTM in communal conservancies in the Zambezi region of Namibia, an important wildlife corridor in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area and one of the few case studies where communities receive monetary benefits from wildlife. Using path modeling, we examined the drivers of tolerance towards five problem species and compared these results with other WTM studies to examine the role of monetary benefits and whether some variables consistently drive tolerance across different species and contexts. Empathy and perceptions of intangible benefits towards a species emerge as consistent drivers of tolerance for all species in Namibia and most other WTM studies but are rarely measured in the literature. Monetary benefits are often presumed to promote tolerance for wildlife however we found only an indirect effect where monetary benefits drive intangible benefits and thus have a “crowding in” effect. These results are encouraging as they suggest tolerance can be promoted indirectly through monetary benefits but also that monetary benefits, for example from trophy hunting are not essential to promote tolerance.