We love animals we never see

The title of this post is actually a paraphrase of something I wrote in my book about pests. I noted that often, we form love affairs with animals that are rare or far away, from a rare albino squirrel to a hyena or wolf. Meanwhile, we barely notice the nearby grey squirrels. And coyotes living near our houses? Someone needs to get rid of them. Right now. Permanently.

It was a view I had found especially predominant in cities and suburbs—especially the deep love and respect for big, charismatic megafauna, accompanied with David Attenborough’s classic tones. But these views were mostly in anecdotes I encountered, in the views of people I talked to.

And so I was especially fascinated to find that recently…someone studied this!

The study comes out of a collaborative group from the UK, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Tanzania, the US, and Kenya, which is always nice to see. The scientists were questioning whether people valued distant animals more than people, and individual animals more than groups of them.

So they asked! They gave surveys and looked at responses from 3,571 people. The questions were simple:

• if the interests of wild animals clash with the interests of people, which do you think should be prioritized?

and

• if the interests of individual animals clash with the interests of groups of animals, which do you think should be prioritized?

People had to rate on a scale, with one end heavy on animal or individual, and the other on people or groups of animals.

The most important part? They did it across very specific locations, asking people in urban and rural areas of the US and UK, as well as urban and rural areas of Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania.

My stereotypes, would have led me to think that probably people in the US and UK, places sometimes called the Global North, would rate animals more important than people, and probably groups more than individuals. After all, in my reporting, I’ve found that in part due to our ideas about elephants, elephants are worth more than people in places like Kenya, in terms of cold, hard cash. And as anyone who recalls Harambe, Cecil, or Marius might know, the outrage over an individual animals seems to magnify the instant someone gives it a name.

But it’s far more interesting than that!

The respondents did divide, with some leaning more toward animals, and more toward individual ones. But the difference wasn’t Global North vs Global South. Rather, the difference was distance. People who lived far from very biodiverse areas rated animals more important than people—whether the people living far from biodiversity were living in the UK or in urban Kenya. They were also more likely to privilege individual animals over groups. People who lived close to biodiverse areas prioritized people over animals, and groups of animals over individuals.

The scientists suggested that those living locally probably deal with human wildlife conflict much more closely than those living far away, who have probably never had an elephant come crashing through their wall or a wolf pick off their calves. They also have been on the receiving end of conservation efforts that tend to focus on preserving whole biodiverse areas—with no people in them. National parks in the US, as well as in places like Kenya and Tanzania, have preserved that biodiversity, often, by getting rid of the people who lived in those areas, people often Indigenous to the area. Their conservation efforts often have severe punishments for poaching, and offer relatively little relief for lost homes, livestock, and lives. So people might have very good reason to want to privilege people over animals, as they have often found that they don’t receive that consideration.

But in places far from these beautiful, charismatic fauna, we don’t see any of that. We see national parks on vacation. We see wildlife through binoculars and documentaries. We see it as WILD, and far different from the rats and pigeons that we live with every day.

We really do love the animals we see rarely. We feel less good about the ones we see too much.

Citation

Mutinhima, Y., Sibanda, L., Rono, B., Kulunge, S., Kimaili, D., Dickman, A., Madsen, E., Mandoloma, L., Tacey, J., Allred, S., & Hare, D. (2025). International differences in conservation priorities are more complicated than Global North-Global South divisions. Biology Letters, 21(3). (It’s open access, you can check it out for yourself!)

Thanks for reading Team Trash: Where People and Wildlife Meet! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Where have you been?

I’ve been finding out that Meta trained its LLM on my book (and a bunch of my scientific papers). And yeah, I’m mad about it. People tell me all the time “oh I JUST use AI for emails, or JUST for letters of reference (yes), or…” I say hey that is carbon intensive! They don’t care. I say hey…that’s really unoriginal, they don’t care. What if I told you you are using the scraped creative work of me, of my colleagues, of artists you admire?

Speaking of AI, people are now using it for search because Google sucks. But it turns out if you ask AIs questions? They return wrong answers 67% of the time on average.

Iguanas may have floated across the Pacific on big chunks of floating vegetation, establishing themselves in Fiji! So fascinating!

Where have I been?

• Writing for Scientific American about fat. Did you know fat is an organ? Did you know there’s more than one kind? Did you know each kind has a different job? How differently would we think about fat if we thought of it as a body part, and not as only something to be gotten rid of?

• Excited to be contributing to the FABULOUS podcast Our Opinions Are Correct! I love this show so very much, Annalee and Charlie Jane will always discuss something with a new angle or sci-fi reference I haven’t heard before. So I’m honored to be on it, though on the other hand this means my opinions might actually be correct and I don’t know how to handle that kind of pressure! ANYWAY, you can listen to me talk about the hats of war, and the original post is here: