A Community-Based Approach to Explore Challenging and Sensitive Issues: Hunting, Wild Meat Consumption, and Zoonotic Disease Risks in Tanzania

Abstract

The case study summarizes our team’s engagement with communities in the Ruaha Landscape of Tanzania, a landscape with abundant protected areas that provides habitat for a wide variety of wildlife and frequent opportunities for human-wildlife interaction through daily livelihood activities, such as agriculture, livestock production, and hunting and wild meat consumption. The study was implemented by the Health for Animals and Livelihood Improvement (HALI) project, a One Health research and capacity-building program investigating health at human-animal-environment interfaces in Tanzania.We applied an integrated multidisciplinary and participatory approach with extensive community engagement to explore wild meat consumption and the associated value chain in several villages bordering protected areas. Working with communities, we investigated factors driving wild meat consumption and trade and designed participatory wildlife sampling approaches for species confirmation and infectious disease testing, including establishing safe sample collection and transport from remote field environments to our university laboratory. Through collaborations with local community members, wild meat samples were opportunistically collected for virus testing and interviews were conducted to explore hunting practices, trade, and socioeconomics in an environment where subsistence hunting and poaching were under considerable legal pressure in the wake of anti-poaching policies. Our findings correlated commonly hunted wildlife species with collected tissue samples and identified risks for transmission of zoonotic diseases associated with hunting practices. Furthermore, we collaborated with stakeholders from participating villages in developing and implementing educational outreach programs aimed at improving awareness of the risks of wild meat to human health through the transmission of zoonotic diseases.© The Authors 2023