This is a great question regarding a major threat to wildlife. During our efforts preserving jaguars and other predators in Mexico (see: https://www.northernjaguarproject.org/outreach/viviendo-con-felinos/), we provide an incentive to landowners by paying for remote-camera pictures of predators to landowners. This rewards positive (not shooting or poisoning) vs.negative events (e.g., paying for depredations of livestock) and promotes landowners working with neighbors to discourage poisoning. By placing cameras on private lands around the reserve, we also increase our abilities to monitor target wildlife while providing outreach and education to the community, and a buffer zone around the core reserve that we own. We have found positive effects, and have more people that want to participate than we can afford.

There are a number of strategies, none of which are likely to be 100% successful, but used in combination they may help to reduce the impact of poisoning.

The first is to try and reintroduce predators in areas where conflict is unlikely or is minimal. If predators were wiped out in an area because of conflicts with humans then you should be trying to avoid putting them back if nothing has changed.

Then you need to understand why people are using poison, what problem do the predators cause. You need to look at potential solutions for reducing that problem. It could be improved fencing, deterrrents or changes in management practices. Diversionary feeding at certain times of year could be another option if problems are seasonal. If the problem cannot be reduced sufficiently then compensatory payments could be an additional option either as an alternative or alongside other measures.

Education could help in some situations, shared pride in their wildlife heritage is something that can be fostered in some communities. While it often does not directly involve those who persecute the animals they may be swayed by pressure from the community into stopping or at least reducing the activity. Education of children may help to change attitudes in the long-run. Education is particularly important where the predators are being targeted wrongly (i.e. that the animals are not causing the problems that they are accused of). The education project on Ethiopian wolves is a good example of this (run by the EWCP http://www.ethiopianwolf.org/ )

Having strong wildlife protection laws and authorities prepared to enforce them may also help but ultimately it is difficult to gather sufficient evidence to prosecute this type of crime so they may only deter a few people from using poison while driving others to use it more deviously. As Miha Krofel has indicated DNA analysis of meat baits is an area that can help provide evidence for prosecution. We have recently also had some involvement with research looking at obtaining human fingerprints from bird feathers and other research looking at the possibility of obtaining human touch DNA from animal carcasses (fur and feather), this is an area of research that is still developing and which could ultimately be useful because people often try to hide the evidence of illegal poisoning, shooting or trapping and may handle carcasses when doing so.

Dimitar Parvanov

I would suggest reading situational prevention of poaching by Dr Lemieux and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325391901_The_Situational_Prevention_of_Wildlife_Poaching_in_Bukit_Barisan_Selatan_National_Park_Sumatra_Indonesia. As Steve Campbell pointed, it should be a combination of different efforts. One may be: the availability and access to common poison in the market can be curtailed or regulated. Also, reducing the purchaser's anonymity (taking note of the identity while purchasing) of the poison may result in reducing its usage for illegal poisoning. Application of the various techniques of Situational Crime Prevention (https://popcenter.asu.edu/sites/default/files/library/25%20techniques%20grid.pdf) may help.