Research overview: religious and cultural values underpinning tolerance for big cats

This overview examines how religious beliefs, sacred associations, and cultural traditions foster, or sometimes undermine, tolerance for big cats. It synthesises cases such as reverence for tigers and lions in South Asian traditions, the goddess associations in the Sundarbans, totemic relationships, and taboos that protect predators, alongside traditions like ritual lion hunting that endanger them. The literature explores how cultural framing can sustain coexistence even amid losses, and how rapid cultural change, migration, and modernisation can erode protective values. The survey argues that understanding and engaging local belief systems is a powerful, often underused, lever for conservation, since culturally rooted tolerance can be more durable than economically induced acceptance.