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The stress of being fenced out of fresh drinking water. The aching hunger that comes with habitat destruction. The sensory assault of machinery and traffic.
All risks that wild animals routinely encounter as they navigate our modern landscapes. Now, in a study designed to understand such pressures from an animal’s perspective, humans have tried to experience them too.
“We really pushed our study participants to think about the whole animal life, not just the standard: ‘What do they eat?’ stuff,” said Phil Tovey, who devised the research to explore the threats facing wildlife on and around Somerset’s pollution-hit River Tone.
“It’s not that they are wild animals and therefore they suffer, it’s that they suffer because of particular things that we have done, and are continuing to do, to make their life a lot worse.”
The Risks Beyond Human Eyes study was led by the University of the West of England and the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA), where Tovey is director.
