Understanding Human Wildlife Interactions in Hong Kong Using the Wild Pig (Sus scrofa) as a Case Study​

Hannah Mumby & Yifu Wang
The University of Hong Kong

Hong Kong is often seen as a concrete jungle, yet more than forty percent of the land area is protected as Country Parks. This provides opportunities for wildlife to thrive and also to interact with humans. Wild pigs (Sus scrofa) are the largest remaining terrestrial mammal native to Hong Kong, and one of the most commonly reported wildlife species in local news media. The interactions between humans and wild pigs can be used to investigate the complex and multi-layered nature of human wildlife interaction. Interactions range from peaceful encounters to injuries, with the former much more common, but the later receiving substantial public and media attention. We based our study on three aspects: 1) tracing online news reports about wild pigs in HK and delineating human wild pig interactions in media in different languages, 2) conducting surveys to investigate public perceptions, and 3) carrying out ecological and physiological studies to understand wild pig diet and ecological impacts. Our key findings include voices appearing in the news media differ in speaker identity, with Chinese media including more residents while English media having more NGO speakers. We found public attitudes towards wild pigs are not linked to their encountering rate with wild pigs but more about personal identity, such as a hiker or pet owner. Findings would later be integrated to propose evidence-based wild pig management strategies. We plan to extend the scope of this study to further species and thereby continue to provide insights on human wildlife interaction in Hong Kong.

About me!

Hannah Mumby

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Hannah Mumby is an Assistant Professor in the School for Biological Science and Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. She leads the Applied Behavioural Ecology and Conservation Lab, where a vibrant and international group research social behaviour, communication, personality and conservation science, with a focus on the right methods for the pressing questions. Before taking up that position, she was based at the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Branco Weiss Fellow and Drapers' Company Fellow at Pembroke College, where she wrote her first popular monograph, Elephants: birth, death and family in the lives of giants in (2020). In 2018 she was a College for Life Sciences Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and in 2017, she was Fulbright Scholar at Colorado State University. She is an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for African Ecology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and was a DST-NRF Research Associate at the Applied Behavioural Ecology and Ecosystem Research Unit at the University of South Africa. She was a Leverhulme Trust funded post-doc at the University of Sheffield, where she also conducted her PhD (2014) on the association between life history and environment in Asian elephants under Virpi Lummaa. She did her undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Cambridge. In 2020, she was awarded the Christopher Barnard Award for outstanding new investigator.

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