The difficulty here is that you are basing all your ideas on an idea of how animals behave and why, which is mostly modeled on your imagination - or, to put it differently, on thought experiments. And because your mind has offered up this theory as a plausible one, no amount of contrary information will touch it, so long as the information is not your own personal observation.

This apparently being the case, you will not be satisfied that your theory is false without thorough, firsthand testing with real wild animals in a real outdoor setting. Your major problem is that it will be all too easy for you to draw false conclusions from negative results.

There's an old joke that has some bearing here.

A man is walking down the street and encounters another man who is busily muttering incantations, burning incense, and bowing in all directions. Intrigued, the first man asks the second what he is doing.

The answer:"I'm keeping wild tigers away!"

The first man exclaims, "But this is Wichita, Kansas. There isn't a wild tiger within 5,000 miles of here!"

The second man looks smug and says, "See. It works!"