Urban wildlife: conflict or coexistence?

Abstract

Urban wildlife management is a specific discipline within wildlife biology, focusing on management and research of species in inhabited areas. Urban wildlife management has become business. Numerous companies operate in this field all around the world, while the growing number of conflicts also demonstrates the urgent need to establish such enterprises in Hungary as well. In agriculture, and more specifically, in wildlife management, each and every new opportunity is important and has to be taken advantages of. Urban wildlife management provides such opportunities principally for well-educated wildlife management professionals. In Hungary we first of all need to establish and clarify the legal background. In this process responsibility should be removed from the game managers working outside the inhabited areas. Legal instruments should be offered for the management, and even for the trapping of both the game- and the protected species. Possibilities for protection have to be provided for the aggrieved parties. Nevertheless, the residents affected by these conflicts have to understand that they are the ones to defend their own private properties.