The Impact of Information on Attitudes toward Sustainable Wildlife Utilization and Management: A Survey of the Chinese Public

SIMPLE SUMMARY: The widespread dissemination of information related to wildlife utilization in new online media and traditional media undoubtedly impacts societal conservation concepts and attitudes, thus triggering public discussions on the relationship between conservation and utilization. In this study, questionnaires were distributed in seven major geographic regions of Chinese mainland to investigate the public’s awareness and agreement with information related to the utilization of wildlife in order to measure the impact of information on various issues relating wildlife conservation and utilization. The Chinese public had the greatest awareness and agreement with information that prevents unsustainable and illegal utilization, and the least awareness and agreement with information that promotes unsustainable utilization. It is also noteworthy that the Chinese public have higher levels of awareness and agreement with information that does not support utilization than with information that supports sustainable utilization. From our research, we can conclude that overall the public tends to support and be informed by a purist view of conservation, and there is significantly less support for conservation based on sustainable utilization. On this basis, we suggest that in the future, conservation education should seek to balance the public’s respect and love for nature which is often inspired by social media, with more scientific information about scientific understandings that influence conservation policy and practice. ABSTRACT: The widespread dissemination of information related to wildlife utilization in new online media and traditional media undoubtedly impacts societal conservation concepts and attitudes, thus triggering public discussions on the relationship between conservation and utilization. A study on how public attitudes and concepts are affected by the related information on wildlife utilization is helpful to implement the scientific wildlife conservation and management strategies, and to propose targeted measures to optimize the information environment. We designed the questionnaire to investigate the public’s awareness and agreement with related information on wildlife utilization so as to measure how information with different dissemination channels, source types, and content orientation influenced the public’s concept of wildlife conservation and utilization. The questionnaire was distributed in seven major geographical regions throughout China. Out of a total of 1645 questionnaires that were collected, 1294 questionnaires were valid, with an effective rate of 78.7%. Results show that respondents had the greatest awareness of information on preventing unsustainable and illegal utilization, and the lowest awareness of information on promoting unsustainable utilization, and that awareness of information that against utilization was higher than that of information which supported sustainable utilization. At the same time, respondents showed the greatest agreement for information on preventing unsustainable utilization and the lowest agreement for information on promoting unsustainable utilization; also, their agreement with information that against utilization was higher than that for information which supported sustainable use. Respondents had a high level of awareness of information on wildlife related to COVID-19 provided by experts. Gender, age, the level of development of the city in which they live, education, vegetarianism, and religious beliefs all affected respondents’ agreement with related information on wildlife utilization. This research suggests that the publicity and education of scientific conservation methods should be emphasized in the future conservation education. In addition, scholars in the field of wildlife research should assume the role of ‘influencer’ and give full play to the scientific guidance of public opinion.