Research overview: sport hunting, social disruption, and puma conflict

This overview synthesises the contested evidence on whether sport hunting of pumas reduces or paradoxically increases conflict with people and livestock. It reviews studies suggesting that heavy hunting removes mature resident males and destabilises social structure, allowing an influx of younger, more conflict-prone dispersers, while other work finds hunting reduces local densities and complaints. The literature examines source-sink dynamics, compensatory immigration, and the difficulty of disentangling hunting effects from habitat and prey variation. The survey frames the debate as central to North American puma policy, where management agencies must reconcile hunter constituencies, livestock interests, and emerging science on the unintended consequences of predator removal.