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In India, as a consequence of stricter protection of wildlife and increased of lands and lands outside the protected area system.

Ulyss Karanth of the U.S. Based Wildlife Conservation Society and India's Center for Wildlife Studies.

While this is a good thing for conservation, it poses serious problems for management because occasionally these interactions turn hostile between people and carnivores.

And this issue is particularly severe with leopards.

Karanth and his team studied interactions

between people and leopards in Karnataka,

a state in India's southwest, that's home to more than 60 million people.

Leopards can be found in 47% of the state in areas outside parks and other sanctuaries. so people and leopards do every once in a while run into each other.

To gauge the frequency of such interactions, the researcher scoured media reports during a 14-month period from 2013 to 2014.

The total tally was 245 separate incidents.

Most were attacks on livestock or simple sightings of the leopards by people, but leopards did attack people 32 times, causing three deaths.

34 leopards died in the study period, mostly from poaching and being hit by vehicles.

Capturing and relocating the animals did not seem to be an effective way to cut down on animal

human contacts.

The study is in the journal Plas 1.

So how can the large carnivores and people better coexist?

The researchers think that an obvious but important step is to get a lot more data on just

where leopards are most likely to be found in populated areas so people

can avoid the cats.

And that farmers should be quickly and fairly compensated for any livestock losses,

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