On July 5, an elephant smashed a house, killing a mother and her four-year-old son in Chitwan. Separately, in Mustang, a snow leopard killed 28 sheep and yaks. In Palpa, when a woman went to inspect her farm in the afternoon, she found that a troop of monkeys had stripped the cobs in her entire field.

Across Nepal, people are talking about these incidents. Almost every day, stories about dangerous animals appear in newspapers, in parliament and on social media. We routinely describe them as ‘human–wildlife’ conflicts. But are they really conflicts between humans and wildlife?

When we say human–wildlife conflict, the phrase portrays wildlife as an active, intentional opponent as if monkeys deliberately raid crops to impoverish farmers, tigers intentionally kill livestock to punish herders, or elephants consciously destroy homes to create human misery. But that is not how wildlife behaves. Animals do not act out of hostility, revenge or political intent. A monkey steals maize because it is an accessible food source. A tiger takes a goat for the same reason it hunts a deer.

When we blame animals, the institutions and decisions that shape these encounters disappear from view. Conflict is portrayed as a clash between people and nature, not between people and people. Natural problems invite technical fixes. Political problems demand political debate. In fact, the government, conservation agencies and international donors shape relationships between people and wildlife through policies, laws, patrols, fines and restrictions on people’s ability to defend their lives and property.

Yet, those who design these policies or dictate practices often live far from the communities that bear their consequences.

The affected communities live beside forests, depend heavily on farming, and bear the daily risks of crop loss, killed livestock and threats to their children and themselves. They often have the least political influence over conservation decisions, despite carrying many of the costs.

Once we recognise that the government’s priorities and policies are behind these apparently natural human-wildlife conflicts, we will seek fundamentally different solutions to address them.

Growing up in rural Nepal, I saw several neighbours lose goats to leopards. They were upset, but never blamed the animals. Such losses were accepted as part of living alongside wildlife. Similar attitudes existed in many forest-dependent communities, where encounters with wild animals were seen as an unavoidable aspect of nature. Today, that perception has changed.

A conversation I had in Chitwan National Park illustrates why. A farmer had come to file a compensation claim after a rhinoceros damaged her crops. I asked whether her parents used to complain when wildlife destroyed their fields. She smiled and replied, “No.” “So why are you claiming compensation now?” I asked. “Because the government pays. Those are the government’s rhinos.” Her response revealed that the conflict was never really with the rhinoceros. It was with the institutions that protect rhinos and determine the relationship between the people and the rhinos.

Farmers often lose far more crops to drought, floods, pests and diseases than to wildlife. Yet, they rarely expect compensation for those losses because no one deliberately created those other risks. But they see wildlife damage as a consequence of policies and actions by the government and other conservation agencies. When the state protects wildlife and restricts people’s ability to defend their crops, many feel the state owns them.

Thus, we should not speak of ‘human-wildlife’ conflict but of ‘human-human conflict’ or ‘local people- conservation authority’ conflict.

Conserving wildlife is a perfectly legitimate public goal, no less important than conserving other components of nature. But if protecting tigers, rhinos or monkeys is a societal choice—and I believe it should be—then those who advocate for conservation should openly defend it. However, respecting and protecting people’s livelihoods is equally legitimate. The problem arises when one group’s priorities dominate and undermine another group’s basic human rights. Nepal’s world-famous tiger recovery illustrates this dynamic.

Since 2010, the country’s tiger population has almost tripled. Tigers did not decide to recover. Governments decided to increase tiger populations. International organisations funded it. Conservation agencies implemented it. As tiger populations recovered, encounters with people inevitably increased.

Describing these situations merely as ‘human–wildlife conflict’ hides this reality. Aided by international donors and conservation NGOs, the government designed policies and programmes that increased the number of tigers, putting locals at risk. This is global conservation at the cost of local lives. ‘Human-wildlife conflict’ obscures these relationships. It blames wildlife while leaving the underlying social and political questions largely unexamined.

Chitwan’s tragedy was not natural. It was the consequence of government policy. This elephant has killed around 25 people over the past 16 years. After every death, local people protested; the authorities promised to improve safety; officials monitored the elephant’s movements, but then another life was lost. People cannot remove, relocate, or otherwise act against wildlife because the government owns and protects it. The same principle applies to snow leopards, monkeys and other protected wildlife. The government defines and structures human-elephant relations.

The way we describe a problem shapes the solutions we pursue. If we define these encounters as conflicts between people and wildlife, we search for ecological fixes—compensation, fencing or translocation. Redefining human-wildlife conflicts as human-human conflict, as a kind of political conflict, leads us to different questions. If we recognise them as conflicts among different groups of people over conservation, we begin discussing governance, accountability and justice.

Until we recognise that these are conflicts over conservation policy rather than conflicts with wildlife itself, we will continue prescribing ecological remedies for what are fundamentally political disputes. Therefore, the question is no longer whether people and wildlife can coexist. It is whether people with different values, interests and power can agree on what coexistence should look like.