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We examined the relationship between self-reported fear of large carnivores and the demographic characteristics of villagers living in a rural district adjacent to Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. Data were obtained from 593 respondents living in 8 villages. The intensity of verbally expressed attitudes was heavily dependent on whether the attitude object was of a general or a specific category. Level of self-reported fear was much higher for specific species of large carnivores than for broad verbal categories like concern over safety due to carnivores in general. Women were more afraid than men. The elderly expressed lower fear than other age groups, but only in response to the general category question. Level of fear was positively correlated with educational level. For almost all questions, villagers living further away from the national park expressed more fear than villagers living closer to the park. Fear can influence attitudes toward wildlife. Understanding whether encounters with wildlife ar...

Attitudes toward large carnivores were surveyed in two regional populations of sheep farmers in Norway, using Kellert's (1991) attitude typology. The annual sheep loss rate to carnivores in the two regions were 4.5% and 0.05%, respectively. The two populations of farmers expressed identical and lowvalues on the ecologistic, moralistic, and naturalistic sub‐scales. Both groups scored moderately high on the negativistic and utilitarian subscales, but farmers from the region with the highest rate of depredation had significantly higher scores on these two subscales than farmers from the region with a low depredation rate. The farmers’ personal anticipated consequence for future sheep farming if depredation continues revealed strong predictive potentials toward both negative and positive attitudes. When controlling for the anticipated consequence of sheep loss, farmers from the region with the highest depredation rate expressed less negative and more positive attitudes toward large carnivores than th...