When the passage of an individual temporarily affects the resources and risks for other individuals (resource depletion, predator attraction, pathogen deposition), recently-visited areas should be temporarily less attractive to conspecifics than similar, non-visited areas. The duration of that effect could help separate between bottom-up and top-down influences on space use and carrying capacity. We used model weighing to estimate the duration of conspecific avoidance from movement tracks obtained from animal-borne GPS tags. In a pilot study into the space use of endangered Barbary macaques Macaca sylvanus, the short estimated durations of conspecific avoidance between groups rejected resource depletion as the main reason why the groups avoided each other. Instead, the estimates matched the expectation if predation risk by dogs and people operated as a strong constraint on resource exploitation, which also explained the size of the home ranges and the degree of home range overlap. We also uncovered pairwise asymmetries indicating that different groups adopted different space use tactics within their areas of overlap. We call for further investigations of this new movement metric with more individuals and across environmental and social gradients.