Social norms and cultural services - community belief system and use of wildlife products in the Northern periphery of the Korup National Park, South-West Cameroon

Abstract

In many traditional societies, beliefs and taboos influence human behaviour towards the natural environment. Such beliefs and taboos are informal institutions where norms rather than official laws determine land use and nature protection in general and wildlife in particular. The present study on beliefs and taboos of the people of the northern periphery of the Korup National Park is an attempt to reveal how norms influence their relation to the environment. A total of 195 households were sampled through a household survey conducted in four villages. The results revealed that before the application of “modern” approaches for wildlife protection and management, the people relied on norms to establish a relationship with wildlife and nature. The enactment of the 1994 legislation on forest, wildlife and fisheries resulted in stiff resistance as it contradicts traditional norms. It was found that 57.4 % of the respondents still perceive wildlife as a resource that can never get extinct. Traditional norms had a differentiated impact especially on game protection. The study recommends that a wildlife benefiting code of beliefs and taboos is developed to provide a basis for establishing a synergy between park management laws and traditional belief/taboo systems that drive the management of wildlife.

Continued availability and sale of pangolins in a major urban bushmeat market in Cameroon despite national bans and the COVID‐19 outbreak

“…At our survey market, many traders have private storerooms and freezers for meat (Randolph, 2016), and in the past other protected species such as gorillas and elephants were available as smoked meat at the same market (Bahuchet & Ioveva, 1999). Our results may also reflect a decline in wild giant pangolins (Nixon et al, 2019), which has been reported in some parts of Cameroon (Abugiche, 2008; Laurent, 1992; Mouté, 2010; Ngoufo et al, 2014).…”

Where Might We Find Ecologically Intact Communities?

“…None of these threats are picked up by remote sensing tools. Threats such as hunting primarily affect large-and medium-sized mammals (Benítez-López et al, 2019;Gallego-Zamorano et al, 2020), although regional variations exist because of hunters' preferences, cultural beliefs, and taboos regarding the consumption of some species (Ngoufo et al, 2014;Bobo et al, 2015). For instance, in Uganda ungulates but not primates are targeted by hunters, unlike just over the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo where primates are widely hunted as well (A. Plumptre pers.…”

Intact but empty forests? Patterns of hunting-induced mammal defaunation in the tropics

“…Hence, we used a binomial model to predict whether mammal populations were locally extinct or not (i.e., whether the relative abundance values were 0 or >0) and then fitted a Gaussian model through the nonzero RRs. We specified as random effects Country, Study, and Species to account for between-country variation in hunting laws and policies, culture, taboos, and traditions [56, 57] and to control for nonindependence in the data from the same study or species. All continuous variables included as fixed effects (see Predictors section) were standardized before model selection, and predictions were done with the models refit with unstandardized predictors.…”