In the Anthropocene, humans have interacted with the natural world in ways that have increasingly influenced many biological processes. Human-wildlife conflict is the result of one of these complex interactions, wherein carnivores are killed or deterred by humans in response to successful or unsuccessful attempts at predation of human-owned livestock. Thirty years ago, Lima and Dill (1990) introduced an equation to calculate wild predation risk based on the probabilistic outcomes of each of five sequential stages of the predation process: encounter, interaction, attack, capture, and death. While this model has widely been used since its inception to describe predator-prey interactions in the wild, it has never been applied to predator-livestock interactions. The aim of our research is to test the applicability of this model in a system where humans play an influential role in the predation process. It is highly likely that the outcomes of predator-livestock interactions are heavily influenced by human interventions, and thus that this type of predation requires a mathematical description of its own.

The risk-disturbance hypothesis (Frid and Dill, 2002) is another theory of predator-prey ecology, which states that animals’ responses to human disturbance reflect perceived predation risk. In Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda, large mammals are vulnerable to subsistence poaching pressure. We are therefore interested in whether large mammals in this system are able to accurately assess the varying mortality risks associated with different types of human cues.