Abstract
The decline in the number of hours Americans spend outdoors, exacerbated by urbanization, has affected people’s familiarity with local wildlife. This is concerning to conservationists, as people tend to care about and invest in what they know. Children represent the future supporters of conservation, such that their knowledge about and feelings toward wildlife have the potential to influence conservation for many years to come. Yet, little research has been conducted on children’s attitudes toward wildlife, particularly across zones of urbanization. We surveyed 2,759 4–8th grade children across 22 suburban, exurban, and rural schools in North Carolina to determine their attitudes toward local, domestic, and exotic animals. We predicted that children who live in rural or exurban areas, where they may have more direct access to more wildlife species, would list more local animals as “liked” and fewer as “scary” compared to children in suburban areas. However, children, regardless of where they lived, provided mostly non-native mammals for open-ended responses, and were more likely to list local animals as scary than as liked. We found urbanization to have little effect on the number of local animals children listed, and the rankings of “liked” animals were correlated across zones of urbanization. Promising for conservation was that half of the top “liked” animals included species or taxonomic groups containing threatened or endangered species. Despite different levels of urbanization, children had either an unfamiliarity with and/or low preference for local animals, suggesting that a disconnect between children and local biodiversity is already well-established, even in more rural areas where many wildlife species can be found.
Highlights
One of the biggest threats to the conservation of biodiversity is the “extinction of experience,” a term used to describe the largescale decline of people’s time spent in natureHow to cite this article Schuttler SG, Stevenson K, Kays R, Dunn RR. 2019
We investigated the preferences of 9–14 year old children toward wildlife, animals, across different levels of urbanization in North Carolina, USA
The similarity of children’s categorization of animals across different levels of urbanization suggests that the presumed higher levels of familiarity children in more rural areas have with local wildlife is limited
Summary
One of the biggest threats to the conservation of biodiversity is the “extinction of experience,” a term used to describe the largescale decline of people’s time spent in natureHow to cite this article Schuttler SG, Stevenson K, Kays R, Dunn RR. 2019. One of the biggest threats to the conservation of biodiversity is the “extinction of experience,” a term used to describe the largescale decline of people’s time spent in nature. Children’s attitudes towards animals are similar across suburban, exurban, and rural areas. Individuals who have had more experiences are more likely to have pro-environmental attitudes, especially when those experiences occurred during childhood (Soga & Gaston, 2016). Children spend much less time outdoors than the generations before them, and fewer people live in rural areas surrounded by large, natural spaces (Kellert et al, 2017). As people spend more time indoors and have less access to natural areas in their daily lives, their familiarity with and perspectives toward local wildlife will likely change
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