Unhoused people and wildlife are increasingly coming into contact. Here’s what can be done to protect them

As homelessness increases around the world, more unhoused people are turning to parks and other urban green spaces to seek shelter. However, these places are also home to animals that live in and around urban areas.

This sets the stage for potentially dangerous interactions between humans and urban wildlife such as coyotes. Unhoused people face the risk of contracting disease from wild animals, while animals can be displaced by human presence.

Recent work by my colleagues and me shows that this issue contributes to human-wildlife conflict, with important ecological and social consequences. To explore conflict between homeless communities and urban wildlife, we focused on coyotes in Edmonton.

One of the most successful carnivores of the Anthropocene, coyotes thrive in cities. They have a remarkable capacity to live alongside humans, as well as an ability to get into trouble with people; conflict includes property damage, disease transmission, attacks on pets and, rarely, people.

Data we examined from the Edmonton Urban Coyote Project showed that the number of coyote conflict reports in the city is increasing. These include interactions in which coyotes intimidated, approached or attacked humans or their pets.

Key to our work were the harsh winter conditions in Edmonton. Consistent snowfall transforms the city into a canvas that records the details of coyote life, which can be read footprint by footprint, telling us what they eat and where they go to find safety.

Cold temperatures also encourage people sleeping outdoors to seek heated spaces, but unoccupied encampments remain highly visible. This combination allowed us to read the stories of human-wildlife interactions in the snow, while respecting human privacy.

Three forms of conflict

Competition: Tracking showed that people experiencing homelessness and coyotes often used the same areas. This makes sense — both seek secure areas, far from major trails, where disturbance is less likely.

Competition between people and wildlife does not require people and animals to be in the same place at the same time. For example, in the winter, coyotes dig dens into the abandoned sleeping platforms of unhoused people. In the spring, people experiencing homelessness damage coyote dens.

Food: Those experiencing homelessness may not be able to secure their food or dispose of trash. Areas surrounding encampments are often littered with food remains. Such refuse becomes an easy meal for opportunistic coyotes.

Human food represents a considerable health risk for wildlife. Wild animals that eat human food are more often diseased and can become food conditioned — a process by which wild animals associate people with food, alongside a suite of behavioural and physiological changes that extend all the way to the gut microbiome. Across species, conflict behaviours are especially difficult to reverse among food-conditioned animals.

Read more:
Coyotes are here to stay in North American cities – here’s how to appreciate them from a distance

Disease: Wherever animals spend time, poop accumulates. This is especially true for species like coyotes, who use scat to communicate. Scat is often left on or near food items — including those found in encampments — and on visually prominent objects, such as litter. We often found coyote scat in and near abandoned encampments.

Contact with coyote scat can cause serious disease in humans. As scats break down from weather, and are even fed on by birds, it becomes part of the soil, but infectious microscopic agents persist.

In Edmonton, up to half the coyotes carry Echinococcus multilocularis — a tapeworm that causes alveolar echinococcosis in humans. This infectious disease is often fatal. By sleeping in scat-strewn green spaces, often without access to hygiene facilities and with difficulties accessing health care, the homeless community faces increased exposure to this (and other) parasites carried by wildlife.

What should we do about it?

The ideal solution is to end homelessness and the factors that cause it. In North America, the single biggest predictor of homelessness is the relationship between income and housing ability; narrowing this gap would benefit both people and wildlife.

Knowing that wildlife threaten a vulnerable human community may lead some to propose wildlife eradication. Evidence from coyotes and other species shows that eradication efforts usually fail, and often after accruing a large price tag, undercutting ecosystem services, and destabilizing animal populations, leading to increased conflict behaviour.

Read more:
Why killing coyotes doesn’t make livestock safer

So what are some feasible, short-term interventions that could alleviate conflict given ongoing homelessness and persisting urban wildlife?

First, there must be more research that involves ecologists, social scientists, medical professionals and people who have experienced homelessness. Diverse teams are best able to tackle challenges that lie at the interface of people and wildlife, research and practice.

Second, direct support to those experiencing homelessness could alleviate some imminent threats to their well-being. The form this support takes should depend on local context.

Finally, health-care professionals and those that work closely with homeless communities should be familiar with local diseases carried by wildlife, their symptoms and the risk factors that affect this community. Doing so represents a small step towards increased access to health care.

It is easy to overlook that cities are ecosystems where both people and wildlife live. Differing privileges, opportunities and discrimination all affect how people relate to urban nature. Our work shows that human-wildlife conflict is shaped by these inequalities.

Fostering human-wildlife co-existence in cities is bigger and more complicated than wildlife management in isolation. If we want to build cities that are healthier for both people and wildlife, we must recognize social inequality as an ecological force and create systems that prevent the circumstances that foster conflict.