Supplementary feeding of wildlife
The predictability of viewing wildlife is important for non-consumptive wildlife tourism , and the provision of food is one means of increasing the probability that animals will appear and behave as expected. Hand-feeding can also be very popular with tourists , because it offers visitors an opportunity to interact closely with wild animals.Artificially augmenting the food supply of wildlife can, however, be problematic.Provisioned foods may lack essential nutrients , although few, if any, studies have yet linked food provisioning with long-termhealth consequences for animals . An abrupt terminationof hand-feeding can disadvantage animals that have developed a dependency on beingfed and have lost the ability to forage naturally, resulting in potential behaviouralproblems and under-nourishment. Hand-feeding can also encourage wildlife to spendmore time around roads and campgrounds, increasing incidence of collision with vehicles . Some animals becomehabituated and docile when fed frequently, but others become assertive and even dangerous . Supplementary feeding,whether intentional or otherwise, may alter the behaviour of wildlife such that they areno longer perceived to behave as wild animals. Lions and hyenas have been known toconverge on stationary tour buses in search of potential prey , and awide range of wildlife, including vultures, hyenas, elephants, bears, raccoons andskunks, forage around garbage bins and refuse sites in search of human foods .In wilderness and nature conservation areas food provisioning may jeopardizenatural ecological processes, but in areas already highly-modified by humans thesituation is often less clear. Information is lagging far behind opinion on this topic, butsome of the major arguments are presented