The growing trend of people feeding wild animals poses a serious risk to the well-being of humans and wildlife as new research from University College Dublin finds these feeding interactions could be driving the artificial selection of harassment behaviour in some species.
In a study based on the fallow deer population in Dublin's Phoenix Park, the largest walled park in any European capital and host to roughly 10 million visitors per year, researchers from UCD found that fawns from mothers who consistently begged for food were significantly heavier than those whose mothers rarely approached visitors.
Each of the 134 fawns measured were from the same herds, across the same grazing areas, and all came from mothers who had equal opportunity to interact with people - leaving begging behaviour as the defining difference that could be cause such disparity in birthweight.
The research, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, associates this begging behavioural trait with those animals with bolder personality types, which according to lead author Laura Griffin could potentially cause some animals becoming more aggressive in order to obtain food.
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Posted On: 08/08/2022