Investigating illegal activities that affect biodiversity: the case of wildlife consumption in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

The illegal use of natural resources, manifested in activities like illegal logging, poaching, and illegal wildlife trade, poses a global threat to biodiversity. Addressing them will require an understanding of the magnitude of and factors influencing these activities. However, assessing such behaviors is challenging because of their illegal nature, making participants less willing to admit engaging in them. We compared how indirect (randomized response technique) and direct questioning techniques performed when assessing non‐sensitive (fish consumption, used as negative control) and sensitive (illegal consumption of wild animals) behaviors across an urban gradient (small towns, large towns, and the large city of Manaus) in the Brazilian Amazon. We conducted 1,366 surveys of randomly selected households to assess the magnitude of consumption of meat from wild animals (i.e., wild meat) and its socioeconomic drivers, which included years the head of household lived in urban areas, age of the head of household, household size, presence of children, and poverty. The indirect method revealed higher rates of wildlife consumption in larger towns than did the direct method. Results for small towns were similar between the two methods. The indirect method also revealed socioeconomic factors influencing wild meat consumption that were not detected with direct methods. For instance, the indirect method showed that wild meat consumption increased with age of the head of household, and decreased with poverty and years the head of household lived in urban areas. Simultaneously, when responding to direct questioning, households with characteristics associated with higher wild meat consumption, as estimated from indirect questioning, tended to underreport consumption to a larger degree than households with lower wild meat consumption. Results for fish consumption, used as negative control, were similar for both methods. Our findings suggest that people edit their answers to varying degrees when responding to direct questioning, potentially biasing conclusions, and indirect methods can improve researchers’ ability to identify patterns of illegal activities when the sensitivity of such activities varies across spatial (e.g., urban gradient) or social (e.g., as a function of age) contexts. This work is broadly applicable to other geographical regions and disciplines that deal with sensitive human behaviors.

Rural–urban mobility influences wildmeat access and consumption in the Brazilian Amazon

“…This is particularly important as consumer preferences for Vulnerable species ( T. pecari and T. terrestris ), which are often accessed through market exchanges, are probably a causal factor in the depletion of their populations even in remote locations > 100 km from central Amazonian towns (Parry & Peres, 2015; Abrahams et al, 2017). Despite claims of high demand in towns (El Bizri et al, 2020b; Chaves et al, 2021a,b) and although demand could increase because of urban growth, we show that conservation interventions relating to wildmeat consumption remain more urgent in rural locations. Thus, monitoring rural–urban flows of threatened species and sustainably managing rural hunting are warranted where strong institutional arrangements facilitate this approach.…”

“…However, we believe underreporting was probably low, as participants reported high purchase rates (c. 40–50%), even in the largest town of Maués (47%). In addition, direct questioning does not appear to generate underestimations of wildmeat consumption in Amazonian towns (Chaves et al, 2021b) as urban residents do not have negative attitudes towards purchasing wildmeat (Chaves et al, 2019). In rural areas, wildmeat was seldom purchased, being instead accessed through direct harvesting or social relations.…”

“…Wildmeat consumption in small and medium-sized towns in Amazonas State is unlikely to be underreported when using direct questioning. If a household declares its consumption of wildmeat it is unlikely to underreport the quantity consumed (Chaves et al, 2021b). We were often offered wildmeat in both rural and urban areas whilst conducting the current study.…”

“…Until recently, urban wildmeat consumption in Amazonia was considered negligible (Nasi et al, 2011), reflecting a paucity of relevant research. However, emerging evidence shows that most households in provincial Amazonian towns consume terrestrial and aquatic wild species (excluding fish) at least occasionally (Parry et al, 2014; Morsello et al, 2015), and estimates of overall urban consumption in Amazonia number in the thousands of tonnes annually (van Vliet et al, 2014; El Bizri et al, 2020b; Chaves et al, 2021a,b).…”

9 Place, Elective Belonging, and the Diffused Audience

“…In principle, to effectively estimate harvest rates, hunting activity should be monitored continuously through methods such as self-monitoring (Valsecchi et al 2014), hunting calendars (Oliveira and Calouro 2019), or through recalls of hunting events (Nunes et al 2019b). However, due to logistical hurdles, in particular the high costs of monitoring (Abrahams et al 2018), the difficulties of accessing more isolated communities, and the distrust of hunters in research (Chaves et al 2021;Oliveira et al 2018), data acquisition on harvests through these methods is not always achievable (Garden et al 2007;Rist et al 2008).…”