As Norris (Reference Norris1956) here makes clear, referring to problems around Gal Oya National Park, established in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1954, our relationship with nature is often far from peaceful, with harm and fatalities on both sides. Not unexpectedly, this journal is replete with narratives of apparent conflict between people and notable animal adversaries: in particular, mammalian carnivores (Inskip & Zimmermann, Reference Inskip and Zimmermann2009), the African Loxodonta africana (Hoare, Reference Hoare2000) and Asian elephant Elephas maximus (Smith & Mishra, Reference Smith and Mishra1992), and the crocodile Crocodylus niloticus and hippopotamus Hippopotamus amphibius (Dunham et al., Reference Dunham, Ghiurghi, Cumbi and Urbano2010).

These narratives in Oryx date from Volume 1 of 1950 (Gee, Reference Gee1950) but are notably more common from 2000 onwards. The interactions described are of three, not necessarily mutually exclusive, types: (1) wild animals eating and/or damaging crops, (2) wild animals predating domestic livestock, and (3) wild animals injuring people, sometimes fatally—and vice versa. With respect to the first, reports of raiding and/or damaging crops mostly involve elephants. Farmers and conservationists have exhibited great ingenuity in devising or suggesting methods to discourage or prevent them entering crop fields, including electric fences (Hislop, Reference Hislop1956), capture and relocation of raiding individuals (Wienman, Reference Wienman1958), controlled shooting (Thouless, Reference Thouless1994), a combination of early warning and communal guarding (Sitati & Walpole, Reference Sitati and Walpole2006), thunderflashes (Sitati & Walpole, Reference Sitati and Walpole2006), the application to rope barriers of grease extracted from chilli Capsicum sp. (Parker & Osborn, Reference Parker and Osborn2006; Sitati & Walpole, Reference Sitati and Walpole2006; Hedges & Gunaryadi, Reference Hedges and Gunaryadi2010), masking the smell of ripening rice (Santiapillai & Read, Reference Santiapillai and Read2010) and playback of felid growls (Thuppil & Coss, Reference Thuppil and Coss2016).

Interactions of the second type arise mostly from the unsporting habit that carnivores have of feeding on easily taken domestic livestock (Hoogesteijn & Hoogesteijn, Reference Hoogesteijn and Hoogesteijn2008; Gusset et al., Reference Gusset, Swarner, Mponwane, Keletile and McNutt2009). Methods used or recommended to prevent this include enclosures for protection of livestock and improved herding practices (Amador-Alcalá et al., Reference Amador-Alcalá, Naranjo and Jiménez-Ferrer2013; Tumenta et al., Reference Tumenta, de Iongh, Funston and Udo de Haes2013), the use of guarding dogs (Rigg et al., Reference Rigg, Finďo, Wechselberger, Gorman, Sillero-Zubiri and Macdonald2011), and in the case of cattle, keeping buffalo, which are more aggressive, in the same paddock (Hoogesteijn & Hoogesteijn, Reference Hoogesteijn and Hoogesteijn2008).

The third type of interaction, involving harm to people and/or wild animals, is sometimes a result of wild animals predating livestock, as in retaliation for predation, but also occurs when people are otherwise occupied, such as collecting forest resources (Khan, Reference Khan2009) or working on croplands (Silwal et al., Reference Silwal, Kolejka, Bhatta, Rayamajhi, Sharma and Poudel2016). Living in proximity to certain wild species is clearly dangerous and the number of human fatalities unpalatable (Nyhus & Tilson, Reference Nyhus and Tilson2004; Dunham et al., Reference Dunham, Ghiurghi, Cumbi and Urbano2010; Silwal et al., Reference Silwal, Kolejka, Bhatta, Rayamajhi, Sharma and Poudel2016), yet ways of reducing the likelihood of wild animals directly attacking people—such as translocation of problem individuals (Goodrich & Miquelle, Reference Goodrich and Miquelle2005; Boast et al., Reference Boast, Good and Klein2015) and use of dogs to warn of the presence of tigers Panthera tigris (Khan, Reference Khan2009)—have been less reported.

Phrases such as human–wildlife, human–elephant and human–carnivore conflict, and similar, are widely used in describing these interactions between people and nature. However, although a convenient shorthand, these phrases may be misleading. They simultaneously embrace interactions that are direct and indirect, intended and unintended, and implicitly suggest both sides are consciously intent on interfering in the life of the other and that the various conflicts are amenable to a single, universal resolution. Some of these conflicts may be expressed better as the interaction of wildlife with livestock, as in vultures vs livestock—an emerging conflict in Spain in which griffon vultures Gyps fulvus are being blamed for the death of livestock irrespective of whether or not they are responsible (Margalida et al., Reference Margalida, Campión and Donázar2014).

These matters aside, the increasing attention afforded to the troubled relationships between people and several wild species is now leading to novel ways of framing the problems and new techniques for reducing harm and fatalities, with an increased emphasis on the search for improved coexistence. Fresh approaches are clearly necessary: the interaction of cultivators and elephants described by Norris (Reference Norris1956) is not a quaint historical anecdote. More than 50 years later people and elephants in Sri Lanka had still not learnt to live together harmoniously, with >100 elephants and c. 50 people killed annually (Santiapillai & Read, Reference Santiapillai and Read2010).

Alternative ways of conceptualizing the interactions between people and wildlife (Mosimane et al., Reference Mosimane, McCool, Brown and Ingrebretson2014; Vitali, Reference Vitali2014; Redpath et al., Reference Redpath, Bhatia and Young2015) now offer new perspectives. Redpath et al. (Reference Redpath, Bhatia and Young2015) argued that many of the so-called conflicts between people and wildlife are actually conflicts ‘…between conservation and other human activities, particularly those associated with livelihoods’, and that therefore ‘…we should distinguish between human–wildlife impacts and human–human conflicts and be explicit about the different interests involved in conflict’. It follows that acknowledging the role of conservation in such conflicts (Redpath et al., Reference Redpath, Bhatia and Young2015) could offer new approaches for easing coexistence.

Irrespective of whose conflict it is, crop raiding by wild animals and depredation of livestock and people, and subsequent retaliation, continue. Promising new techniques for minimizing these impacts of people on wildlife—and vice versa—include improved communications to help reduce crop raiding (Graham et al., Reference Graham, Adams and Kahiro2012), a photographic database of tigers that facilitates identification and relocation of problem animals (Karanth et al., Reference Karanth, Kumar and Vasudev2014), examination of the costs and benefits of lethal vs non-lethal control of problem predators (McManus et al., Reference McManus, Dickman, Gaynor, Smuts and Macdonald2015), collection of information on the factors associated with attacks on people by crocodiles (Pooley, Reference Pooley2015) and tigers (Silwal et al., Reference Silwal, Kolejka, Bhatta, Rayamajhi, Sharma and Poudel2016), and novel methodologies that help people agree on how to reduce losses of livestock to wildlife (Rust, Reference Rust2016).

As space for cultivation, nature protection and harvesting of natural resources becomes more contested, there is added urgency to the search for new conceptual approaches and for novel methods that are specific to individual species, places and situations. To paraphrase Pooley (Reference Pooley2015), the ever greater ingenuity of thought and research now needs to be mobilized to save lives, of people and of wild species.

To mark Volume 50 of Oryx this Editorial and the references cited herein are freely available as a virtual issue of the journal at http://journals.cambridge.org.