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Living alongside predators can entail substantial costs both in terms of livelihoods and personal safety. Negative interactions with predators can lead to negative attitudes and behavioural intentions such as retaliatory or pre-emptive killing. As a result, conservation strategies are increasingly adopting human–wildlife coexistence approaches aimed at minimizing the costs associated with living with predators by providing direct or indirect benefits. This is done in the hope that people will foster positive attitudes and behavioural intentions towards predators. However, people's attitudes and their behavioural intentions are not necessarily linked, and both need to be understood for conservation actions to be effective. We conducted 747 semi-structured interviews with community members in the Maasai Mara, Kenya, to determine which factors influenced people's attitudes and behavioural intentions towards predators and whether the two were linked. Most interviewees (57.52%) had a positive attitude towards predators as measured by their assertion that people, livestock and predators should coexist. Their attitude was dependent on benefits, occupation, conservancy membership and perceived community ownership of predators, but was not influenced by the costs of livestock depredation. Most respondents who were members of a conservancy had positive attitudes towards predators but this differed by conservancy, suggesting that, in addition to benefits, conservation politics could influence attitudes. In total, 10.3% of respondents said that they would kill a predator if it killed their livestock. This behavioural intention was only influenced by the respondent's attitude. Understanding the factors that influence attitudes and behavioural intentions will aid future management and coexistence strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although protected areas are the basis for many conservation efforts they are rarely of an adequate size for the long-term survival of populations of large, wide-roaming mammals. In the Maasai Mara, Kenya, communally owned wildlife conservancies have been developed to expand the area available for wildlife. As these continue to develop it is important to ensure that the areas chosen are beneficial to wildlife. Using presence data for cheetahs Acinonyx jubatus, elephants Loxodonta africana, spotted hyaenas Crocuta crocuta, leopards Panthera pardus, lions Panthera leo and wild dogs Lycaon pictus, collected through interviews with 648 people living outside protected areas, we identify key wildlife areas using false positive site-occupancy modelling. The probabilities of site use were first determined per species based on habitat, distance to protected area, human presence and rivers, and these probabilities were then combined to create a map to highlight key wildlife areas. All species, except hyaenas, preferred sites closer to the protected areas but site use varied by species depending on habitat type. All six species avoided human presence. Leopards, elephants, lions and wild dogs preferred sites closer to rivers. The resulting combined map highlights areas that could potentially benefit from conservation efforts, including the expansion of wildlife areas, and areas where human development, such as a newly tarmacked road, could have an impact on wildlife. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]