Many of the tools and tactics used to minimize conflict between wolves and livestock rely on a wolf’s ingrained fear of the unknown. Known as neophobia (fear or aversion to anything new, unfamiliar or novel), it’s a behavior used by many wildlife species for day-to-day survival.
Wildlife managers and producers can utilize a wolf’s neophobia by providing novel stimuli that disrupt patterns and discourage wolf presence. Several options exist, including fladry (a temporary barrier composed of a cord or rope with red flags tied along its length that you can read about here) as well as auditory and visual scare devices. However, these tools and techniques can lose their novelty over time, especially when not deployed properly.
I sat down with Dr. Brenna Cassidy, Wolf Monitoring and Data Coordinator, and Adam Baca, Wolf Conflict Coordinator, to better understand what neophobia is and how it affects CPW’s wolf monitoring and conflict minimization efforts.
But first, what are scare devices?
Scare devices are a category of equipment that are mostly stationary and deter wildlife by simulating human presence.
CPW maintains an inventory of both visual and auditory scare devices that can be loaned out for free to producers experiencing predator activity at their operations.
Visual devices include everything from electric lanterns hung in trees to solar-powered devices that project different colored lights.
Visual scare devices are best deployed on open landscapes because they rely on the predator seeing them. These tools work because they present something unnatural and surprising for predators, who tend to avoid the unknown. Historically these devices have been effective on everything from foxes in Australia to lions in Africa due to their ability to mimic human presence.
In comparison most auditory scare devices are motion-triggered — meaning they have a shorter effective range — but can create a strong adverse reaction in predators. This is especially true for motion-activated devices that are deployed along the travel routes of predators.
Auditory scare devices are most effective when combined with active monitoring efforts, such as remote trail cameras and in-person field observation, undertaken by CPW staff. These staff members include biologists, damage specialists and range riders. . The information gathered through these monitoring efforts helps wildlife managers identify the travel routes wolves use to access areas with high conflict potential. This allows them to develop strategies to disrupt that behavior.
“Having a bullhorn or propane cannon can be very effective at disrupting a wolf’s routine, but it is most effective if you can catch them in the middle of undesired behavior,” Baca said. “Having a frightening experience attached to undesired behavior, such as traveling into calving grounds on private land, can make a wolf associate that behavior with a sense of fear. This fear, or discomfort, in turn can change wolves’ behavior to avoid a given behavior or area. We can achieve this by placing motion-activated scare devices along a path humans don’t want wolves to travel down, which might effectively and nonlethally reduce conflict.”
Because of their reliance on neophobia, both visual and auditory scare devices have limited effective deployment times. Wolves and other predators begin to realize that bright lights and loud sounds are the only negative outcomes these devices produce. They eventually become accustomed to the devices. This is particularly true if the devices are left in the same spot for extended periods of time.
To maximize effectiveness scare devices should be moved or switched out with other conflict minimization tools regularly to avoid familiarity. These devices can also be complemented with other techniques such as electrified turbo fladry, which reinforces neophobia with a painful physical stimuli. Scare devices are also best suited for smaller pastures (300 acres or less) or areas with high potential for conflict.
“There is no one-size-fits-all solution to wolf-livestock conflict,” Baca said. “When we are planning out conflict minimization efforts, we generally look at scare devices as a short-term deterrent or additive tools. It’s something we can quickly deploy while a more comprehensive conflict minimization plan is being established or incorporated into other efforts such as fladry and range riding.”
Why do animals develop neophobia, and how does it affect their survival?
Different animals exhibit varying levels of neophobia based on a number of factors. These factors include their trophic level (their position in the food chain)l, what resources they need to survive, and how broad of a diet they have.
”People often think about animals that are lower trophic levels being more neophobic, because their survival depends on being flighty around new things and getting away from predators that may stalk or chase them. This would include many small mammals and also prey animals such as ungulates like deer and elk that survive by hiding or running from predators,” Dr. Cassidy said. “In comparison, larger predators are typically not as neophobic, but wolves are an outlier in that they display a higher level of fear of unfamiliar objects and changes in environment than we would expect.”
A potential cause for this greater display of neophobia among wolves is the history of predator control over the last few centuries.
“In the last couple hundred years, humans have become a high source of mortality for wolves,” Dr. Cassidy said. “Historic predator control efforts included widespread use of traps, poison and incentivized lethal removal. This meant a more curious wolf might end up being killed and a more cautious one might end up getting away.”
While important to survival, neophobia can also be a double-edged sword if it is too pronounced.
“From an evolutionary perspective, neophobia is a survival mechanism. Being fearful of something new might help an animal survive, and therefore a species survives broadly by avoiding some new dangerous thing,” Dr. Cassidy said. “But that also means that as a species, those individuals might not be as willing to take a risk to explore a new habitat, so they might not be able to expand their range because they are less willing to try something new. There is kind of a sweet spot of being cautious enough to not run into significant trouble and being adaptable enough to deal with novel things even if they’re still cautious of them.”
On the other end of the behavioral spectrum is neophilia, which is a strong curiosity for new things. This is a behavioral trait commonly found in species that live in human-dominated landscapes, such as raccoons.
Raccoons are constantly encountering new things when they live alongside humans. They have developed a high level of adaptability as a result of their curiosity and broad diet (a trait that neophobic animals do not commonly have).
Beyond species-level characteristics, neophobia is also determined on the individual level. It can vary within a pack and across the lifespan of individual animals. For instance, young wolves commonly display less neophobia than older adults.
This is not necessarily because young wolves are less fearful, but because they are more naive than older wolves. They haven’t encountered as many potential threats.
Neophobia can also be influenced by intentional and unintentional human actions that normalize or incentivize interaction.
“If animals have repeated confirmation that something is not only not scary, but is something beneficial — like someone’s feeding them food — then they will become less neophobic and much more food conditioned or habituated,” Dr. Cassidy said. “This can lead to wild animals who are generally neophobic of humans to become a nuisance or problem animals. Bears are a prime example of this and can become habituated to humans that are feeding them or just not storing food and waste properly.”
How does neophobia impact monitoring and conflict minimization efforts?
While a useful survival tool — and an important factor in many conflict minimization efforts — wolves’ natural neophobia can make monitoring their activities more challenging.
“Generally wolves don’t want to overlap with people, that includes items left in the field such as the remote trail cameras we use to monitor their movement,” Dr. Cassidy said. “Wolves can be cautious in approaching trail cameras or avoid them altogether, but if they do decide they are interested, they are more likely to investigate extensively compared to most other canids.”
In experimental settings, wolves and dogs generally reacted quite differently to novel stimuli in their environment. Wolves generally take longer to approach an unknown object and spend more time investigating it.
“We’ve all probably seen dogs just barrel up to an object in the mountains and be like, ‘what’s that?’ but then lose interest pretty fast. In comparison, wolves take a lot more time and try to figure out what something is from a distance. If they get bold enough they then take the time to investigate it from all angles, sniff it, maybe roll it around and get as much information as they can,” Dr. Cassidy said.
Once wolves become used to something and realize it is not a threat, they can lose interest or fear of it. This is important when considering what conflict minimization efforts to use and how often to adjust them.
This is where close collaboration between CPW’s field staff and producers is crucial for effective conflict minimization.
“So many of the tools and techniques we use are reliant on a wolf’s hesitancy to engage with the unknown, and as soon as wolves figure out something isn’t a threat they start to ignore it,” Baca said. “This is why the most effective conflict minimization efforts are adaptive to wolf behavior and built around disrupting a wolf’s sense of normalcy. Some tools also have a physical stimulus that helps reinforce a wolf’s neophobia, like turbo fladry that provides a nonlethal shock if touched.”
In addition to evaluating deployment times and frequently changing positions of devices, conflict minimization staff have to consider what tools are being used across the landscape a wolf or wolves are engaging with.
“When we are planning out conflict minimization efforts for a large landscape such as a pack territory or a county, we really are trying to create a mosaic of different efforts so that wolves are deterred without habituating them to a specific tool’,” Baca said. “If we just go to every producer and put up the same scare devices across an entire county, the wolves are going to figure out real quick that the lights and sounds don’t mean they are in danger and that can actually make it harder for us to effectively use other nonlethal tools from our toolbox.”
Additional information about scare devices and CPW’s conflict minimization efforts can be found in our Wolf Resource Guide and Wolf-Livestock Conflict Minimization Program Guide.
Producers interested in having a site assessment conducted and exploring tools that may be viable, reasonable and effective at minimizing conflict at their operations can contact their local area’s CPW office.
Written by Luke Perkins, a Statewide Public Information Officer for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
