Ex post and insurance-based compensation fail to increase tolerance for wolves in semi-agricultural landscapes of central Italy

Range expansion by large carnivores in semi-agricultural landscapes represents a serious challenge for managing human-carnivore conflicts. By focusing on an area of recent re-colonization by wolves in central Italy, where livestock owners lost traditional husbandry practices to cope with wolves, we assessed an ex post and a subsequent insurance-based compensation program implemented from 1999 to 2013. We cross checked official depredation statistics and compensation records from various registries, complementing them with a questionnaire survey of sheep owners. Compared to ex post compensation (1999–2005), under the insurance program (2006–2013) compensation paid annually dropped on average by 81.1 %, mostly reflecting that only 4.6 (±0.7 SD) % of sheep owners stipulated the insurance annually. Officially, only 5.5 % of active sheep owners were annually afflicted by wolf depredation during the insurance scheme, but we estimated this proportion to be as high as 34.3 % accounting for the proportion of affected sheep owners who did not officially claim depredations. Coupled with substantial retaliatory killing (minimum of five wolves killed/year), this large amount of cryptic conflict is a symptom of distrust by livestock owners of past and current conflict mitigation policies, despite more than two decades of compensation. We conclude that compensation may fail to improve tolerance toward carnivores unless it is integrated into participatory processes and that lack of reliable data on depredations and damage mitigation strategies exacerbates the conflict. Being advocates of the evidence-based paradigm in management, scientists share a key responsibility in providing objective data concerning progress of conflict management.