Nepal, July 11 -- On July 5, an elephant smashed a house, killing a mother and her four-year-old son in Chitwan. Separately, in Mustang, a snow leopard killed 28 sheep and yaks. In Palpa, when a woman went to inspect her farm in the afternoon, she found that a troop of monkeys had stripped the cobs in her entire field.

Across Nepal, people are talking about these incidents. Almost every day, stories about dangerous animals appear in newspapers, in parliament and on social media. We routinely describe them as 'human-wildlife' conflicts. But are they really conflicts between humans and wildlife?

When we say human-wildlife conflict, the phrase portrays wildlife as an active, intentional opponent as if monkeys deliberately raid crops to imp...