The productive, ecological, and perception problem of the ?unacceptable? livestock losses due to scavenger birds

BALLEJO, FERNANDO; PLAZA, PABLO I.; LAMBERTUCCI, SERGIO AGUSTÍN

BIOLOGICAL CONSERVATION

ELSEVIER SCI LTD

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2020

0006-3207

Very often, unsustainable production systems consider wildlifespecies affecting productivity harmful, malicious, or pests enhancinghostile attitudes towards them. Regrettably, in many cases, these attitudes obey to perceptions based on the lack of proper information andscientific evidence. We have recently shown that the existing conflictbetween obligate/facultative scavenger birds and humans inPatagonian farms is not what farmers mostly perceive, as livestocklosses due to scavengers are low (Ballejo et al., 2020). The ca. 4% ofnewborn losses we found represent 0.1% of sheep stock in the studiedfarms. Moreover, scavenger birds did not affect any other age-categorythan newborn lambs. In our article, we also proposed solutions to mitigate this conflict (Ballejo et al., 2020). Swan et al. (2020) suggest thatthose losses can be ?unacceptable? for farmers, that estimations couldbe conservative, and that scavengers could be perceived as ?cruel?.Here, we argue that those comments lack at least four key importantaspects: 1) knowledge about livestock production in extensive systems,2) scientific support, 3) proper data interpretation, and 4) comprehensive ecological evaluation