Lay people’s and experts’ risk perception and acceptance of vaccination and culling strategies to fight animal epidemics

Abstract

To fight highly infectious animal diseases, there are almost exclusively two possible strategies that can be done: vaccination and culling. For effective risk communication and management strategies during a crisis, the risk perception and beliefs of different stakeholders are essential. Risk perception and acceptance of various strategies to fight such animal epidemics are examined for the population, farmers, and veterinarians. Data were gathered from questionnaires sent out to three stakeholder groups. All stakeholders clearly preferred a vaccination strategy to a culling strategy. We found that farmers, although they were expected somehow to be experts, had response patterns more similar to the population than to the veterinarians. As expected, veterinarians perceived less risk and had higher acceptance ratings than the population. We equally found gender differences for lay people and for experts. Therefore, the explanation of differences in risk perception between experts and lay people according to knowledge could clearly be ruled out. We detected differences between men and women concerning their attitudes and moral values, which were the same for lay people and for experts.