Human-carnivore conflicts challenge biodiversity conservation and local livelihoods, but the role of diseases of domestic animals in their predation by carnivores is poorly understood. We conducted a human-leopard (Panthera pardus) conflict study throughout all 34 villages around Golestan National Park, Iran in order to find the most important conflict determinants and to use them in predicting the probabilities of conflict and killing of cattle, sheep and goats, and dogs. We found that the more villagers were dissatisfied with veterinary services, the more likely they were to lose livestock and dogs to leopard predation. Dissatisfaction occurred when vaccination crews failed to visit villages at all or, in most cases, arrived too late to prevent diseases from spreading. We suggest that increased morbidity of livestock makes them particularly vulnerable to leopard attacks. Moreover, conflicts and dog killing were higher in villages located closer to the boundaries of the protected area than in distant villages. Therefore, we appeal for improved enforcement and coordination of veterinary services in our study area, and propose several priority research topics such as veterinarian studies, role of wild prey in diseases of domestic animals, and further analysis of potential conflict predictors.

Human-carnivore conflicts over livestock depredation are increasingly common, yet little is understood about the role of husbandry in conflict mitigation. As shepherds and guarding dogs are most commonly used to curb carnivore attacks on grazing livestock, evaluation and improvement of these practices becomes an important task. We addressed this issue by studying individual leopard (Panthera pardus) attacks on sheep and goats in 34 villages near Golestan National Park, Iran. We obtained and analyzed data on 39 attacks, which included a total loss of 31 sheep and 36 goats in 17 villages. We applied non-parametric testing, Poisson Generalized Linear Modelling (GLM) and model selection to assess how numbers of sheep and goats killed per attack are associated with the presence and absence of shepherds and dogs during attacks, depredation in previous years, villages, seasons, ethnic groups, numbers of sheep and goats kept in villages, and distances from villages to the nearest protected areas. We found that 95.5% of losses were inflicted in forests when sheep and goats were accompanied by shepherds (92.5% of losses) and dogs (77.6%). Leopards tended to kill more sheep and goats per attack (surplus killing) when dogs were absent in villages distant from protected areas, but still inflicted most losses when dogs were present, mainly in villages near protected areas. No other variables affected numbers of sheep and goats killed per attack. These results indicate that local husbandry practices are ineffectual and the mere presence of shepherds and guarding dogs is not enough to secure protection. Shepherds witnessed leopard attacks, but could not deter them while dogs did not exhibit guarding behavior and were sometimes killed by leopards. In an attempt to make practical, low-cost and socially acceptable improvements in local husbandry, we suggest that dogs are raised to create a strong social bond with livestock, shepherds use only best available dogs, small flocks are aggregated into larger ones and available shepherds herd these larger flocks together. Use of deterrents and avoidance of areas close to Golestan and in central, core areas of neighboring protected areas is also essential to keep losses down.

Large carnivores are currently disappearing from many world regions because of habitat loss, prey depletion, and persecution. Ensuring large carnivore persistence requires safeguarding and sometimes facilitating the expansion of their populations. Understanding which conservation strategies, such as reducing persecution or restoring prey, are most effective to help carnivores to reclaim their former ranges is therefore important. Here, we systematically explored such alternative strategies for the endangered Persian leopard (Panthera pardus saxicolor) in the Caucasus. We combined a rule‐based habitat suitability map and a spatially explicit leopard population model to identify potential leopard subpopulations (i.e., breeding patches), and to test the effect of different levels of persecution reduction and prey restoration on leopard population viability across the entire Caucasus ecoregion and northern Iran (about 737,000 km2). We identified substantial areas of potentially suitable leopard habitat (~120,000 km2), most of which is currently unoccupied. Our model revealed that leopards could potentially recolonize these patches and increase to a population of >1,000 individuals in 100 yr, but only in scenarios of medium to high persecution reduction and prey restoration. Overall, reducing persecution had a more pronounced effect on leopard metapopulation viability than prey restoration: Without conservation strategies to reduce persecution, leopards went extinct from the Caucasus in all scenarios tested. Our study highlights the importance of persecution reduction in small populations, which should hence be prioritized when resources for conservation are limited. We show how individual‐based, spatially explicit metapopulation models can help in quantifying the recolonization potential of large carnivores in unoccupied habitat, designing adequate conservation strategies to foster such recolonizations, and anticipating the long‐term prospects of carnivore populations under alternative scenarios. Our study also outlines how data scarcity, which is typical for threatened range‐expanding species, can be overcome with a rule‐based habitat map. For Persian leopards, our projections clearly suggest that there is a large potential for a viable metapopulation in the Caucasus, but only if major conservation actions are taken towards reducing persecution and restoring prey.

1. Human-wildlife conflicts are widespread, particularly with big cats which can kill domestic livestock and create a counteraction between conservation and local livelihoods, especially near protected areas. Minimisation of livestock losses caused by big cats and other predators is essential to mitigate conflicts and promote socially acceptable conservation. As big cats usually kill by throat bites, protective collars represent a potentially effective non-lethal intervention to prevent livestock depredation, yet the application and effectiveness estimation of these tools are very limited.2. In this study, for the first time we measured the effectiveness of studded leather collars in protecting cattle from leopard (Panthera pardus) attacks. We conducted a randomised controlled experiment during 14 months to collar 202 heads and leave uncollared 258 heads grazing in forests and belonging to 27 owners from eight villages near three protected areas in Mazandaran Province, northern Iran. Our resultsshow that none of collared cattle and nine uncollared cattle were lost to leopard depredation, meaning that collars caused a zero relative risk of damage and a perfect 100% damage reduction. Most losses occurred in summer and autumn due to lush vegetation attracting more cattle, long daytime allowing movements deep into leopard habitats and dense cover favouring leopard hunts from ambush.Losses were recorded in only six owners and four villages, suggesting local rarity and patchy distribution of leopards.4. We suggest that collars can be successfully applied to cattle freely grazing in habitats of leopards or other felids for a long time and thus remaining persistently exposed to depredation. As grazing cattle are usually not supervised by shepherds or dogs, collars can be the only practical protection tool. Production and sales of collars can become a sustainable small-scale business for farmers to further boost conservation and rural livelihoods.