Lion Friendly Livelihoods

The costs associated with large carnivore presence can never be reduced to zero. No matter how good our livestock protection programmes are, there will always be some livestock killed, and there will always be opportunity costs linked to protecting livestock from predation. There are also significant opportunity costs linked to maintaining natural habitat rather than converting land to other uses. It is therefore important to create benefits linked directly to the conservation of healthy, biodiverse ecosystems, including the largest carnivores. Ultimately, the costs associated with large carnivore presence needs to be outweighed by the benefits, so the conservation of large carnivores is valuable to local communities and governments.