Publication to Society & Animals: "Fear of the Wolf: Are Human-Wildlife Conflicts Actually Human-Human Feuds?"
Institute of Marketing and Communication Management
Publication to Society & Animals: “Fear of the Wolf: Are Human-Wildlife Conflicts Actually Human-Human Feuds?”
Lisa Märcz, researcher in the field of Human-Animal Relations, has published her qualitative study on humans and wolves in Germany in Society & Animals, a Brill journal. The paper illustrates and discusses the fears and concerns of marginalized people who criticize the re-integration of wolves. Human realities in which wolves embody symbols for good or evil, are engrained as myth, or become a physical threat, reemerged when the first wolves resettled in Germany around 2000 and appeared in rural but also urban areas. This work shows how, remarkably, negative attitudes toward wolves were mostly fueled by human-human conflicts in which the wolves were the common denominator. With this work we provide answers to an often asked and still pressing question: why does wolf management not work for everyone? Our discussion is a perfect example for how qualitative research represents voices of people who are left out of grand design surveys but who make a crucial part of the big picture, nevertheless. It argues for a social guideline on how to deal with ‘the other’ for the sake of a functioning wolf-human coexistence.
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