People who feed wildlife almost always have good intentions behind their actions, but the majority of people are completely unaware of the sometimes devastating long-term and short-term consequences that providing supplemental food for wildlife can carry.
There are multiple ways in which people feed wildlife, which ranges from throwing bones over the wall for the hyenas or honey badgers after a braai, to just scooting some crumbs off the table for the birds or squirrels to carry away. That is called active feeding. There is also passive feeding, or accidentally leaving food within reach of wildlife. This can be harder to eliminate. Whether it is crafty monkeys that take the gap while you aren’t looking, or not knowing you’ve left something behind after a meal, the animals end up getting fed regardless. Unfortunately, what stays the same, regardless of the method or means, is the consequences of feeding animals.
Some of the main consequences created by feeding wildlife include:
- Loss of foraging skills (especially in young animals that are learning how to find food)
- Loss of fear of humans (also known as habituation, which creates dangerous situations)
- Inadequate nutrition (most foods we eat aren’t natural and can lead to malnutrition; foods “fill” the animal up but do not contain enough natural proteins, vitamins or minerals, which can lead to emaciation and even death. Bread is a prime example of this.)
- Spread of disease (convenience of food means higher populations in a smaller space, leading to more interactions and an increased rate of disease spreading, even to humans).
- Interference with migratory and resource-finding movements (if food is readily available, why move? This leads to a stagnant population, which severely impacts the habitat and animals).
- Disturbing natural balance (via knock-on effects: if more animals are staying instead of moving around, more animals come in to interact with them. This is especially prominent as we move up the food chain - more rodents means more snakes and birds, which means more scavengers and larger predators, and the cycle keeps going, increasing the damage and risk.)
- Loss of biodiversity (as animals become used to being fed, they don’t move, and they overpopulate. They then push other species out. Rats and mice are a prime example of this - the more rats and mice there are, the less other small species will thrive in that environment).
- Destruction of habitat (overpopulation destroys resources and the natural balance)
- Creates human-wildlife conflict, where animals may become aggressive towards humans, or where the risk of an incident is severely increased (such as an increased risk of humans accidentally disturbing a venomous snake). This can lead to dangerous situations for animals and people, and more often than not ends in disaster, with serious injury or death as a result.
It might feel like you are “only giving the francolins some crumbs”, but every little bit counts negatively in the bigger scheme of things. And if you are feeding wildlife, chances are, others are too. Add up every person, with every crumb or bone, and you have a big impact in a negative way.
Please don’t feed the animals - they deserve a better, longer, more natural life, and their space in the way that they should be living in it. They deserve to be WILD, not fed and “altered”.
by Tess Woollgar. Images courtesy of Pixabay.