India: Red foxes increasingly rely on garbage and food scraps
In northern India, red foxes can be seen rummaging through kitchen waste. The growing dependence of wild animals on food scraps could affect ecological processes and increase conflicts with humans.
The Spiti Valley, located in the remote Trans-Himalaya, is one of the least populated places in India and home to several rare and endangered wild animals. There, to see wild herbivores like the Siberian ibex (Capra sibirica), you might have to walk up to mountain pastures sometimes at 5000 meters (16,404 feet) high. If you want to see a snow leopard (Panthera uncia), you might have to track herds of Himalayan blue sheep (Pseudois nayaur) and hope to find a leopard doing the same. If you want to see a Himalayan wolf (Canis lupus filchneri), well, good luck.
But to see a red fox (Vulpes vulpes), you just have to go to a village and take a leisurely walk after dinner. You are likely to see a fox rummaging through kitchen garbage: small piles of food scraps usually thrown in the backyard.
According to researchers from the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), even in this landscape of vast open spaces, people and wildlife cannot avoid encountering each other. In a recent study published in the Journal of Arid Environments, researchers analyzed the diet of red foxes from five localities in three states across the Trans-Himalaya and one location in Dachigam National Park in Kashmir. In places close to humans, such as the Spiti Valley, Ladakh, and the village of Chiktan in Kargil, between 30 and 55% of the food red foxes ate came from human sources.
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Red foxes rummaging through kitchen waste or garbage dumps are common in Trans-Himalayan communities and make up between 30% and 55% of their diet. This red fox was seen in the village of Gete in the Spiti Valley. Image by Abhishek Ghoshal.
Humans in the Himalayas are inadvertently providing a substantial amount of food to these animals, including discarded meat bones, fruits, dead livestock, cereals, and non-edible items like plastic, paper, or rubber, which researchers euphemistically called Human-Derived Materials (HDM).
This is not a new phenomenon, nor is it restricted to red foxes.
Cosmopolitan Consumers
Scientists have noted that humans have been supplementing the diet of wild animals since we were hunter-gatherers discarding the remains of kills. In fact, it is believed that the domestic dog evolved from an ancestor attracted to the garbage dumps of prehistoric humans.
The options have only increased over time. Today, wild animals can access subsidized food from community kitchen waste, garbage dumps and landfills in big cities, discarded fish catches in coastal areas, and even directly when people feed animals like monkeys. Thomas Newsome, an ecologist and professor at the University of Sydney, Australia, who has been studying the consequences of food subsidies to wild carnivores like dingoes (Canis lupus dingo), said that most species consuming food waste are generalists who do not rely on specific foods.
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A diet based on human waste can be beneficial for animals like the red fox, but only in the short term. Photo: Linda Stanley / Wikimedia Commons.
Red foxes are particularly cosmopolitan in their eating habits. This species, found throughout the Northern Hemisphere, eats rodents, small birds, eggs, lizards, insects, fruits, berries, and carrion from other animals’ kills.
Fast and Easy Meals
Therefore, the transition from this versatile diet to dumpster diving in the Himalayas seems unsurprising. But what is the motivation? What were the animals thinking?
“I’m getting food without expending too much energy,” said Bilal Habib, a WII scientist and one of the lead researchers of the red fox study.
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The red fox is found throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere, in both America and Europe, Asia, and even northern Africa. Photo: Egil Johannessen / Wikimedia Commons.
Such a diet can be beneficial for animals like the red fox in the short term. Studies show that provisioning increases the animals’ body weight, boosts fertility, and enhances their chances of mating and producing offspring.
One reason for this is that provisioned foods are typically a “predictable, calorie-rich, and easily digestible food source,” said Asmita Sengupta, an ecologist from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE) in Bangalore, India, who studies the effect of food provisioning on Rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) in the Buxa Tiger Reserve in the eastern state of West Bengal.
Newsome added that a scarcity in the supply of natural foods could also drive wild animals towards human subsidies. But the costs of such behavior far outweigh the benefits, the three researchers said.
The Dangers of Fast Food
Even in the remote Trans-Himalayas, the waste humans generate today includes plastics and medicines that are likely harmful to red foxes, noted Habib.
Such dumpster diving also attracts a larger and more powerful carnivorous competitor: the domestic dog. In 2015, researchers from the conservation groups Nature Conservation Foundation in India and Snow Leopard Trust in the U.S. reported that red foxes and dogs were often drawn to the same communities and garbage dumps in Spiti. The presence of dogs did not seem to deter the smaller, usually solitary foxes from staying away. These stray or feral dogs, which move in packs, can attack foxes and spread diseases like canine distemper to wild animals.
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There is competition even for garbage in the Trans-Himalaya. Wild dogs often rummage through the same trash heaps as red foxes, leading to conflicts between the two species. Photo by htsh_kkch via Flickr.
Even if there were no stray dogs, Habib said there were other issues with wild animals accessing food waste.
“I expect there are naturally two red foxes around the community, but this garbage provides for five or six [foxes]. A wildlife lover might think this is a good thing, [but] in the long run this can bring problems to the species,” he said.
Newsome agreed and added that provisioning increases the chances of conflicts with people. “Food waste also acts as a magnet for wildlife activity, so it can potentially bring animals very close to humans,” Newsome said, leading to attacks on livestock or even people in the case of large predators.
“Even communities that are tolerant of wildlife right now might develop a negative attitude in such a case,” Habib added.
A disproportionate increase in wild animals like red foxes could also affect other animals in the wild through a phenomenon called hyperpredation, where an increase in the number of carnivores due to garbage would lead to a simultaneous increase in attacks on natural prey species like the Royle’s pika (Ochotana roylei) in the case of red foxes. But the prey species would not be able to sustain the predator numbers and would eventually die out. Without natural prey, the carnivores would depend even more on waste.
The Reference Article: India: los zorros rojos dependen cada vez más de la basura y restos de comida
