Abstract
The European Landscape Convention (ELC) emphasises that the public should be extensively involved in the processes of landscape protection, planning and management. In spite of the emerging interest in the relationship between animals and landscapes in the study of animal geography, little is known about the influence of the landscape-animal component on public aspirations and the values attributed to landscape. We conducted a survey in the form of an image-based questionnaire in order to evaluate the influence of certain animal species, in this case livestock, on landscape preferences. The results show that all grazing animals have a positive impact on landscape preferences, although some species seem more popular than others. The preference for scenes with animals decreases, however, when compared with scenes with other landscape features (vegetation, traditional buildings or water). Significant differences in preferences for scenes with animals were observed according to certain sociodemographic variables such as gender, familiarity with the landscape and direct involvement in livestock farming. Of the groups surveyed, livestock farmers showed the strongest preferences for the scenes with animals. The findings of this study can be applied within the citizen participation policies encouraged by the ELC, as well as in the protection, management and planning of rural landscapes in which livestock is an appreciable feature.
Highlights
Animal geography first appeared in the 1990s as a branch of cultural geography that centred on “the study of where, when, why and how nonhuman animals intersect with human societies” (Urbanik 2012, p. 38)
In pair “E” the majority of respondents preferred the scene with animals. 61.9% chose the scene with cattle, while 38.1% preferred the scene with a greater density and diversity of vegetation
In this study we conducted a survey to evaluate the role that livestock play in landscape preferences
Summary
Animal geography first appeared in the 1990s as a branch of cultural geography that centred on “the study of where, when, why and how nonhuman animals intersect with human societies” (Urbanik 2012, p. 38). Since this subdiscipline has been growing continually and diversifying (Lorimer & Srinivasan 2013), giving rise to a wide body of research that analyses the relations between human beings and animals from different geographic perspectives, as manifested in reviews of the literature carried out by authors such as Buller (2013, 2015, 2016) and Hovorka (2017, 2018a, 2018b) Ever since this geographic field of research first appeared, various researchers have underlined the role of different animal species in the creation of places and landscapes (Wolch 2002; Wolch et al 2003). They claimed that livestock was a significant cultural aspect of the landscape and that the variations in the type of breeds played an important, albeit undervalued, part thereof
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