The process of weaning is related to a critical or threshold body weight attained by offspring among large‐bodied mammals; the anthropoid primates, ungulates and pinnipeds. While weaning weight was allometrically related to maternal weight in interspecific comparisons, it was isometrically related to neonatal weight. When a neonate had grown to four times its birth weight, it was weaned. Differences between taxonomic groups were found only among the fasting phocids, where weanlings attained a lower, but proportional, weight. The duration of lactation was only weakly allometrically related to maternal or neonatal weight, and varied between individuals intraspecifically as a function of maternal condition. The time to weaning appears to be ecologically sensitive rather than to reflect interspecific life‐history variation, in that, irrespective of the time to weaning, similar proportional weights appear to be attained. Interspecific similarities in threshold weaning weights are suggested to result from constraints on maternal abilities to meet energetic requirements of offspring through lactation after infants attain a threshold weight.

Land outside of gazetted protected areas is increasingly seen as important to the future of elephant persistence in Africa. However, other than inferential studies on crop raiding, very little is understood about how elephantsLoxodonta africanause and are affected by human‐occupied landscapes. This is largely a result of restrictions in technology, which made detailed assessments of elephant movement outside of protected areas challenging. Recent advances in radio telemetry have changed this, enabling researchers to establish over a 24‐h period where tagged animals spend their time. We assessed the movement of 13 elephants outside of gazetted protected areas across a range of land‐use types on the Laikipia plateau in north‐central Kenya. The elephants monitored spent more time at night than during the day in areas under land use that presented a risk of mortality associated with human occupants. The opposite pattern was found on large‐scale ranches where elephants were tolerated. Furthermore, speed of movement was found to be higher where elephants were at risk. These results demonstrate that elephants facultatively alter their behaviour to avoid risk in human‐dominated landscapes. This helps them to maintain connectivity between habitat refugia in fragmented land‐use mosaics, possibly alleviating some of the potential negative impacts of fragmentation. At the same time, however, it allows elephants to penetrate smallholder farmland to raid crops. The greater the amount of smallholder land within an elephant's range, the more it was utilized, with consequent implications for conflict. These findings underscore the importance of (1) land‐use planning to maintain refugia; (2) incentives to prevent further habitat fragmentation; (3) the testing and application of conflict mitigation measures where fragmentation has already taken place.

In recent years there has been a proliferation of projects aiming to integrate human development needs with conservation objectives, and to establish mutually beneficial relationships for the management of natural resources between rural communities and the state. This paper presents data from a case study of human-wildlife interactions in villages along the northern boundary of the Selous Game Reserve in south-east Tanzania. Since 1989, this area has been the site of a project working to promote community wildlife management (CWM). Questionnaire survey data were used to examine villagers' conservation attitudes towards wildlife, the Game Reserve, and the activities of the CWM project and state wildlife management authority. Despite local support for the conservation of wildlife, many respondents were either unaware or held negative views of the activities of the wildlife management institutions. Logistic regression analyses show that while access to game meat from the CWM project has had a positive influence on perceptions of wildlife benefits and awareness of the project's activities, it has had no significant effect on local perceptions of the Game Reserve and the activities of the state wildlife management authority. The factors underlying the observed pattern of conservation attitudes were identified as the inequitable distribution of benefits from the CWM project, and the limited nature of community participation in wildlife management. The importance of institutional issues for the future progress of participatory approaches to conservation with development is emphasized.