- The lowland or South American tapir (Tapirus terrestris), a vulnerable species on the IUCN Red List, has lost an estimated 50 percent of its habitat to deforestation caused largely by cattle ranching.
- Cattle ranching is a leading cause of deforestation in Colombia’s Orinoquía and the Amazon.
- A recent study shows that a simple fencing technique to contain cattle while allowing for smaller mammals to pass through protects ranchers’ livestock while improving forest habitat.
- The study is a promising start for coexistence research, experts say, as other tapir populations across Latin America face similar interactions with humans as their habitat becomes increasingly fragmented.
In the Orinoco River Basin spanning Venezuela and Colombia, biodiversity and agriculture are at odds. Cattle ranching is one of the leading causes of deforestation in Colombia’s Orinoquía and the wider Amazon, degrading habitat for wildlife in the region. Meanwhile, cattle wandering into nearby swampy forested areas are prone to fatal injuries and can spread disease to other animals.
In Colombia, a team of researchers teamed up with cattle ranchers in the department of Meta to find a solution to one central question: How can cattle, a crucial part of local food security and livelihoods, coexist with tropical wildlife?
To find out, the collaboration conducted a study in the Rey Zamuro—Matarredonda private nature reserve, where they installed fences around the confines of small-scale cattle ranches and tracked forest mammals such as lowland tapirs (Tapirus terrestris), spotted paca (Cuniculus paca), black agouti (Dasyprocta fuliginosa), and South American coati (Nasua nasua). They found that a simple two-wire wooden fence was enough to keep cattle away from grazing the forest understory that wildlife depends on. Meanwhile, smaller species could pass through ranches as needed — a win for habitat connectivity. The study was published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.
“We need to think about changes in management to make cattle ranching more sustainable with concrete conservation outcomes,” Juliana Vélez, lead author of the recent study, told Mongabay. “If it’s really not possible to stop doing agriculture or cattle ranching, there are ways where we can do better.”
“Probably the best message from [Vélez’s] study was that managing cattle and leaving some areas free of cattle for wildlife has advantages for both of them,” says Rafael Reyna-Hurtado, a biologist in the department of conservation and biodiversity at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur in Mexico. He added that the study is one of the few to examine human-wildlife coexistence solutions, a growing area of research, and one of the first to look at herbivores.
Cattle ranching and the live cattle trade are leading drivers of deforestation in the Orinoco and Amazon basins; in the first few months of 2024, the Colombian government reported that deforestation had increased by 40 percent compared to 2023.
As species lose habitat, competition for resources such as water and food intensifies, says Tania Marisol González Delgado, a biologist and professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia. In the case of tapirs, the species depends on intact, healthy forests to survive, so this is especially problematic during the dry season, when cattle are more likely to browse plants and drink water from palm swamps. This erodes the soil and decreases the amount of low-lying, fast-growing plants available for tapirs when palms – a staple of tapirs’ diets during the wet season – aren’t fruiting, Vélez added.
Keeping livestock out of forests also protects the chemical makeup of the soil, González Delgado told Mongabay, and helps reduce conflicts with other wildlife such as jaguars or large groups of peccaries, which compete for forest resources.
Solving the root problem
While food security is a major priority in South America, there are clear differences between sustainable and unsustainable ranching methods, Vélez explained. Small-scale cattle ranching is less harmful, while large-scale, intensive agriculture has decimated tropical habitats. Better certifications and traceability are also necessary, she added. Currently, it’s almost impossible to know whether cattle were sustainably raised or legally traded.
During the latest legislative session, a bill introduced in the Colombian Senate sought to address those concerns by creating a cattle identification system to prevent livestock trade from deforested areas, a measure supported by the cattle ranching industry and actor-activist Leonardo DiCaprio. Although it was shelved, congresspeople plan to reintroduce the bill in the next session.
Cattle ranching has long had a history of deforestation. In the 1980s and ’90s, Colombian law required landowners to cut forests to maintain their properties; otherwise, there was a risk the government would confiscate them. Later, however, ranchers learned how to sustainably manage these natural savanna landscapes via controlled burns, say César Barrera, a co-author and cattle rancher who participated in the study.
In the Orinoquía, Vélez and her co-authors found that fences were an effective management tactic specifically for small-scale ranches. While it could be scaled to large-scale ranches with forest patches, which also provide water and shade for cattle, it’s not a catch-all solution for intensive, high-density cattle ranches with rampant deforestation, as found elsewhere in the Amazon. Roaming cattle not only overgraze the forest understory but are also susceptible to fatal injuries from the muddy terrain, costing ranchers money.
It’s an expense to build fences on their ranches, but the cost may be worth it, said Juan David Rodriguez, another cattle rancher who participated in the study. The costs of maintaining fences are less than the costs of searching for lost cattle and veterinary bills if the cattle are hurt, he told Mongabay. On ranches without fences, as many as 100 cattle have been lost throughout a dry season, he said, each of which costs an estimated $450. Plus, it costs about $600 to pay two people to monitor and retrieve lost cattle every day for four months; fences eliminate that hiring need.
Increasing biodiversity is also in ranchers’ favor, Barrera says. “The benefit is, I would say, obvious,” he said, because having healthy forests adjacent to savannas where cattle ranches are located helps maintain wildlife populations that in turn help control pests and other disease vectors, for example.
While the fencing technique works for small-scale ranches in the Orinoquía, it won’t work everywhere, González Delgado warned.
“Mitigating deforestation goes beyond fencing techniques,” she wrote in a message to Mongabay. “It involves addressing direct causes such as illegal logging, the expansion of the agricultural and livestock frontier, land grabbing, fires, etc., and working on indirect causes such as policy and market issues.”
Looking beyond Colombia
In the Maya Forest, the largest tropical forest in Mesoamerica and home to the endangered Baird’s tapir (Tapirus bairdii), similar wildlife-and-cattle coexistence issues are at play, said Reyna-Hurtado, who studies Baird’s tapirs and other mammals in Mexico. Free-range cattle are frequent in this region. Recently, he and other biologists have recorded starving tapirs suffering from screwworm disease, an illness that may have been caught through interactions with cattle. When a screwworm fly (Cochliomyia hominivorax) lays larvae in the open wound of a host animal, it creates a parasitic infection that can be fatal. While the screwworm has not been detected in lowland tapirs, it’s a growing concern for mountain tapirs (Tapirus pinchaque), the most endangered tapir species with fewer than 2,500 individuals in the wild.
Climate change has increased tapirs’ interactions with humans too. In 2019, an intense drought pushed tapirs to search for water in towns, sometimes targeting the same drinking water sources as cattle. “If a disease is coming into this wild population that we have in the Maya Forest, we may lose the largest population of this endangered species in Mesoamerica,” Reyna-Hurtado told Mongabay.
But the reality is that human and wildlife communities are coming closer into contact as development and ranching infringe on forest habitat, he added. “We need to find a way to coexist,” he says, so studies like this one “will be great for these scenarios.”
That said, solutions must be context-dependent, Reyna-Hurtado explained. In Mexico, where the climate is drier than in the Orinoquía, the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (CONANP) has installed drinking-water containers for tapirs in areas that will steer them away from villages. This helps them avoid vehicle collisions, cattle diseases, and farms — where angry farmers sometimes kill tapirs out of retaliation for raiding their crops.
Similar farmer-tapir dynamics have played out in Costa Rica for a different reason. Baird’s tapir populations have increased outside of protected areas, prompting some people to switch their livelihood to ecotourism, such as hikes, wildlife photography, and bird watching.
“That allowed that idea of coexistence,” said Esteban Brenes-Mora, a conservation biologist in Costa Rica focused on tapirs.
But ecotourism isn’t a catch-all solution — nor should it be, Brenes-Mora said. He and Jorge Rojas-Jiménez, a wildlife veterinarian and tapir specialist with Tapir Vet, have also researched how electric fences on farms can mitigate tapir-farmer interactions. The key to sensible solutions, they say, is addressing social and environmental justice.
“A next step would be pushing for the government, NGOs, and agencies to facilitate sustainable farming, especially with crops,” which can include ecotourism, Brenes-Mora told Mongabay.
Rainfall has become increasingly unpredictable from climate change, affecting farmers’ crop productivity and drying up creeks where tapirs drink water, pushing them toward humans. Illegal cattle trade in Nicaragua has also made screwworms a bigger concern, said Rojas-Jiménez.
According to Brenes-Mora and Jorge Rojas-Jiménez, small-scale cattle ranching isn’t profitable in Costa Rica compared to Colombia, and the fencing technique in Vélez’s study isn’t yet scalable. Instead, governments should encourage bioeconomic options such as agroforestry and community-based approaches to human-wildlife coexistence, Brenes-Mora said.
Still, according to Vélez’s co-authors, showing quantitative results is important for encouraging other ranchers to adopt similar techniques in areas where small-scale ranching is feasible.
“The study made us see which animals move [through this area], but it doesn’t mean that livestock and conservation and forests and animals can’t be as they have been on these lands for a long time,” says Barrera. “It is necessary to do management and [make] modifications … and continue doing it.”
Banner image: A female lowland tapir and her calf detected by a camera trap. Image courtesy of Juliana Vélez.
Citations:
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González, T. M., González-Trujillo, J. D., Palmer, J. R., Pino, J., & Armenteras, D. (2017). Movement behavior of a tropical mammal: The case of Tapirus terrestris. Ecological Modelling, 360, 223-229. doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2017.07.006
Vélez, J., McShea, W., Pukazhenthi, B., Rodríguez, J. D., Suárez, M. F., Torres, J. M., … Fieberg, J. (2024). Cattle exclusion increases encounters of wild herbivores in neotropical forests. Journal of Applied Ecology, 61(10), 2444-2454. doi:10.1111/1365-2664.14751