The Ekistics of Animal and Human Conflict

Book excerpt: Urban wildlife management is a town planning subject. It is logical and important to relate the animal and human conflict seen all over the world, as a phenomenon which is applicable to all types of human settlements, despite the diversities and complexities of cultures, societal structures, laws, value systems, religions and so on. A universal principle or theory governs and applies to all cities which define these conditions and phenomena creating the conflict or coexistence. This book investigates the niches of one of the key urban animals from a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic perspective and explores how these niches are naturally synonymous to similar patterns, structures and compositions within human settlements. It explores and defines the demographic patterns, thresholds and phenomenon, which leads to formation of the different levels and extremes of interaction between the species. This forms a paradigm which classifies this conflict within the various disciplines and frameworks of urban ecology. The focus is primarily on urban dogs, it being a keystone species, but is later related with other urban animals as well. The premise for this approach is that history has shown how certain species have persuasively coexisted with humans for so many millennia, yet a conflict happens between animals and humans and within humans over animals. It is thus logical to believe that the forces which create this conflict cannot solely be natural to the species in question and have to come from outside – from the settlement patterns of both species and the “net resultant force and dynamics”. The book looks at these dichotomies in four distinct but interrelated ways. It delves deep inside four niches which form the dynamics of any settlement – spatial, cultural, ecological and economic and explores all scales at which the “succession” and evolution of animals take place in highly urbanized settlements.