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Conference abstract2007

The consumptive network around hunting; can that explain why we see attitude stability in Sweden?

Ericsson, Göran

Abstract

Conventional wisdom suggests that attitudes toward hunting are becoming more negative. This “guess” seems to be consistent with media reports, political actions, hunting participation, and general social change. Those of us who conduct research on human dimensions of wildlife have little incentive to dispute this conventional wisdom since the threats to hunting and the idea that there is growing opposition to hunting increases the interest in wildlife managers and hunters associations in studying the “problem.” Questions about change are easy to ask but hard to answer because they require data over time. At minimum two cross-sectional surveys with exactly the same question wording done on the same population at different times is required. The basis of this paper is a replication of a survey conducted in 1980 which we asked Swedes about their attitudes toward hunting and about wildlife. In 2000 we were able to replicate this survey to see if there is any evidence increases in negative attitudes toward hunting or if support for hunting is stable or increasing. Support for hunting had increased from 1980 from 72 percent support to 81 percent support. Using national data we showed that seven out of ten Swedes say that they use meat from game in the household at least once a year. This finding made us explore the consumptive pattern and distributional effects around hunting in 69 local Swedish municipalities as a part of larger survey in 2004. One hypothesis explored is that the distributional effects are relatively more important in municipalities with a low proportion of hunters

Published in

Title: ISSRM: Book of abstracts

Conference

ISSRM: International Symposium on Society and Resource Management