topics including African ecology and conservation, insects and citizen science. He has made more than 30 documentaries for BBC Radio and World Service, most recently the series Tooth and Claw, eight programs examining our complex relationships with predators. Hart's latest book, The Deadly Balance: Predators and People in a Crowded World, explores our difficult interactions with predatory animals such as lions, bears and wolves, and how we can balance conservation with development to create a world where both predators and people can thrive.
Hart applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Deadly Balance and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Deadly Balance focuses on tigers eating people. There’s an idea that big cats only attack people if the cats are injured or weakened. Page 99 discusses this idea and reflects that, whilst this may well have been the case 100 years ago, it certainly isn’t the case now. In India, healthy young male tigers are often responsible for attacks. The main issue now is that tigers breed well when humans aren’t persecuting them, and the protection tigers have is leading to large numbers of young males roaming the countryside looking for territories. This brings them into contact with livestock and people, both of which are easy prey.Follow Adam Hart on Twitter.
I think that opening the book at page 99 gives a pretty good impression of the book. Several key themes are developed throughout the book, which examines how we can find a balance between the conservation needs of large predators and the needs of people living alongside them. Three of these key themes are represented on page 99. The first is that predators are a threat to people, and vice versa. The second is that the situation is complex, varying with location, time and species. Thirdly, a key theme is that conservation is difficult, and we must include people in our reckoning or we will likely end up getting poor outcomes. The ideas developed on page 99 for tigers in modern day India encapsulate a great deal of that thinking.
Two things that page 99 doesn’t reflect so well are the diversity of predators that may consider us as prey, and the multiple issues of living alongside them. The book is divided into chapters more-or-less arranged around specific animals that can hunt, kill and eat us. Tigers are without doubt, even in the modern world, a major player when it comes to eating people, but lions (Ch3) and crocodiles (Ch4) individually account for more people than tigers. Other chapters explore hyenas, leopards and other cats, wolves and other dogs, bears, and less obvious animals including eagles (rare, but it happens), chimpanzees (infants are particularly vulnerable), pythons, and even army ants.
In the developed world we often call for “better conservation”, but we seldom pay the price of living alongside wildlife. The book’s conclusion is that, until we have some empathy and understanding with those living in what we arrogantly call “habitat”, we will fail in conserving the wildlife we admire safely from afar.
--Marshal Zeringue
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