The presence of large predators entails a range of costs and some benefits for the communities that live alongside them. The cost in terms of the value of livestock lost to predation is well known, but this represents only a part of the costs that people experience, as it does not account for non-market costs such as fear, avoidance behaviours and threat to human life. We quantify the total cost of lion presence for agro-pastoral communities in Zimbabwe using economic valuation techniques. The total perceived value of one additional lion was estimated to be negative US$180 per person per year, which is several hundred times larger than the market value of the average loss of livestock per household. If making simplifying economic assumptions, this discrepancy reveals the magnitude of the non-market costs associated with the presence of large predators. The disvalue of lion presence was linked to fear, ecocentric values, wealth and trust in compensation institutions. We also demonstrate the importance of considering heterogeneity in preferences within communities; segments of the population did not have net negative value attached to lions, and some disliked monetary compensation. We also estimate the willingness-to-accept for two human-wildlife conflict mitigation programs in terms of acceptable increases in lion numbers, as opposed to monetary units which is the conventional approach in economic valuation studies. We argue that estimating value in terms of biodiversity outcomes should be used more widely. We also demonstrate the distorting effect of distrust towards compensation in choice experiments and argue that economic valuation methods employing choice experiments should control for this distrust when estimating willingness-to-pay. These discoveries have relevance for a wide range of situations where potentially dangerous wildlife species co-exist with people.

大型捕食者的存在给与它们生活在一起的社区带来了一系列成本和一些好处。牲畜因捕食而损失的价值成本是众所周知的，但这只是人们经历的一部分成本，因为它没有考虑非市场成本，例如恐惧、回避行为和对人类生命的威胁. 我们使用经济估值技术量化了津巴布韦农牧社区狮子存在的总成本。估计每人每年额外增加一头狮子的总感知价值为负 180 美元，这比每户家畜平均损失的市场价值高出数百倍。如果进行简化的经济假设，这种差异揭示了与大型掠食者的存在相关的非市场成本的规模。狮子存在的贬值与恐惧、生态中心价值观、财富和对补偿机构的信任有关。我们还展示了考虑社区内偏好异质性的重要性；部分人口对狮子没有净负值，有些人不喜欢金钱补偿。我们还根据可接受的狮子数量增加来估计两个人类与野生动物冲突缓解计划的接受意愿，而不是货币单位，这是经济估值研究中的传统方法。我们认为，应该更广泛地使用生物多样性结果方面的价值估计。我们还证明了选择实验中不信任对补偿的扭曲效应，并认为在估计支付意愿时，采用选择实验的经济估值方法应该控制这种不信任。这些发现与潜在危险的野生动物物种与人类共存的广泛情况有关。