Effects of watching wildlife television on wildlife conservation behavior

For many years, there has been a widespread assumption that wildlife television programs make a useful contribution to public involvement in wildlife conservation. More recently, however, a number of authors have questioned this, suggesting that wildlife shows may do little to help and, in some cases, might make things worse by lulling viewers into a false sense of security regarding the state of the world's wildlife. Unfortunately, the academic research literature has had little to say on this topic. This dissertation makes a small contribution to filling this gap in the research literature. It provides of snapshot of the amount and types of wildlife programs available during two study periods in 2004, describes the audience for this genre in the Seattle metropolitan area, and examines the relationship between viewing wildlife programs and performance of selected wildlife conservation behaviors. The current study also examines the role played by three contingent relationships identified as potentially important on the basis of literature reviews: (1) types of wildlife program watched; (2) level of individual interest in wildlife; and (3) level of engagement (attention and cognition/elaboration) with wildlife television.;The findings suggest that wildlife television programs are among the most important sources of information about wildlife for the general public, and are therefore deserving of additional research attention. The findings also suggest that watching wildlife television programs makes a small but positive contribution to taking selected wildlife conservation actions. Effects are stronger for those viewers who are more cognitively engaged in the programs they watch, a finding that held for all of the different types of wildlife shows examined. Not surprisingly, level of engagement varied positively with level of interest in wildlife. The two concepts do, however, appear to be distinct. It seems likely that the measures of engagement used for the current study capture the interaction between the individual interest in wildlife that a viewer brings to a program, and the situational interest created by the programs themselves.