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Children’s attitudes towards animals are similar across suburban, exurban, and rural areas

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...

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Autores principales: Schuttler, Stephanie G., Stevenson, Kathryn, Kays, Roland, Dunn, Robert R.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6659664/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31372320
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7328
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author Schuttler, Stephanie G.
Stevenson, Kathryn
Kays, Roland
Dunn, Robert R.
author_facet Schuttler, Stephanie G.
Stevenson, Kathryn
Kays, Roland
Dunn, Robert R.
author_sort Schuttler, Stephanie G.
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-66596642019-08-01 Children’s attitudes towards animals are similar across suburban, exurban, and rural areas Schuttler, Stephanie G. Stevenson, Kathryn Kays, Roland Dunn, Robert R. PeerJ Biodiversity 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. PeerJ Inc. 2019-07-23 /pmc/articles/PMC6659664/ /pubmed/31372320 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7328 Text en © 2019 Schuttler et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Biodiversity
Schuttler, Stephanie G.
Stevenson, Kathryn
Kays, Roland
Dunn, Robert R.
Children’s attitudes towards animals are similar across suburban, exurban, and rural areas
title Children’s attitudes towards animals are similar across suburban, exurban, and rural areas
title_full Children’s attitudes towards animals are similar across suburban, exurban, and rural areas
title_fullStr Children’s attitudes towards animals are similar across suburban, exurban, and rural areas
title_full_unstemmed Children’s attitudes towards animals are similar across suburban, exurban, and rural areas
title_short Children’s attitudes towards animals are similar across suburban, exurban, and rural areas
title_sort children’s attitudes towards animals are similar across suburban, exurban, and rural areas
topic Biodiversity
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6659664/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31372320
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7328
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