Attitudes towards Wildlife Consumption inside and outside Hubei Province, China, in Relation to the SARS and COVID-19 Outbreaks

Shuchang Liu; Zheng Feei Ma; Yutong Zhang; Yingfei Zhang

doi:10.1007/s10745-020-00199-5

Attitudes towards Wildlife Consumption inside and outside Hubei Province, China, in Relation to the SARS and COVID-19 Outbreaks

Hum Ecol Interdiscip J. 2020;48(6):749-756. doi: 10.1007/s10745-020-00199-5. Epub 2020 Nov 11.

Authors

Shuchang Liu¹, Zheng Feei Ma², Yutong Zhang³, Yingfei Zhang⁴

Affiliations

¹ School of Biosciences, University of Nottingham, Loughborough, LE12 5RD UK.
² Department of Health and Environmental Sciences, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, 215123 Jiangsu China.
³ Jinzhou Medical University, Jinzhou, 121001 Liaoning China.
⁴ Mathematics Teaching and Research Office, Public Basic College, Jinzhou Medical University, Jinzhou, 121001 Liaoning China.

Abstract

We designed a self-administered 20-item questionnaire to determine changes in attitudes towards wildlife consumption in Chinese adults during the SARS epidemic in 2002-2003 and on-going COVID-19 pandemic that was first identified in December 2019. A total of 348 adults (177 males and 171 females) with a mean age of 29.4 ± 8.5 years participated, the majority (66.7%) from Hubei. The percentages of participants who had eaten wildlife significantly decreased from 27.0% during SARS to 17.8% during COVID-19 (P = 0.032). The most common reason participants provided for consuming wildlife was to try something novel (64.9% during SARS and 54.8% during COVID-19). More than half of participants (≥53.5%) reported that they had stopped eating wildlife meat because most species of wildlife are legally protected. Our study results indicate over the period between the SARS epidemic to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, attitudes towards the consumption of wildlife in China have changed significantly.

Keywords: COVID-19; Ecology; Hubei Province, China; SARS; Wet markets; Wildlife consumption.