DOI: 10.5061/dryad.931zcrjt5
title: Urban wild meat consumption across southern forested Cameroon and the limited effect of COVID-19 on wild meat consumption patterns

description: Overexploitation of wildlife is pervasive in many tropical regions, and in
 addition to being a significant conservation and sustainability concern,
 it has received global attention given discussions over the origins of
 zoonotic disease outbreaks. Where unsustainable, consumption of wild meat
 by urban residents has been identified as a major socio-environmental
 challenge, given it is a significant driver of wildlife declines. Yet,
 information on urban wild meat consumers and possible ways to target
 conservation interventions remains lacking. Using one of the largest
 datasets of urban wild meat consumers (1,391) collected through structured
 questionnaires in 20 towns and cities, we model the demographic,
 psychographic, and spatial factors associated with wild meat consumption
 patterns in Cameroon. We find that nearly half of the sampled
 consumers ate wild meat once per week or more, and find that the
 probability of being a frequent consumer was greater among men, those
 living in smaller towns, and those who do not consider there to be a link
 between eating wild meat and disease. Threatened pangolin species are
 highly preferred among urban consumers, and most consumers do not consider
 there to be a link between COVID-19 and pangolins. Most respondents had
 eaten wild meat since the beginning of COVID-19 and had not reduced their
 wild meat consumption due to COVID-19. For the first time, we show that
 consumers with beliefs against a link between wild meat consumption and
 disease and those with greater income were less likely to have decreased
 their wild meat consumption. We identified stakeholders including
 teachers and religious/community leaders as potentially appropriate
 messengers for demand-reduction campaigns, with television and radio being
 the most trusted communication channels among wild meat
 consumers. Crucially, our study advances the current scientific
 understanding of the factors that influence wild meat consumption
 frequency and change due to COVID-19 by urban consumers (particularly
 health beliefs and settlement size). We discuss how our results could be
 used to inform the design of wild meat demand-reduction interventions to
 bring the consumption of wild meat towards sustainability in Cameroon, and
 how our approach is applied pan-tropically.
description: We conducted a structured questionnaire study in 20 towns and
 cities located in four regions (Centre, East, Littoral, and South) across
 the forested southern half of Cameroon in August 2021. We formed teams of
 three researchers each, and each team was assigned to one region. Whilst
 teams were allocated to a given region, they also sampled towns and cities
 strategically if they were located along roads between allocated regions.
 In small towns, respondents were recruited to the study using the
 street-intercept method (Buschmann, 2019), whereby pedestrians were
 approached in the street. A semi-random sampling method was adopted,
 whereby researcher teams randomly approached pedestrians near central
 market areas and actively attempted to recruit men and women of all age
 groups evenly to improve sample representativeness. The same method was
 used in medium, large, and very large towns/cities, but we targeted our
 sampling efforts to areas where wild meat is sold to maximise the
 likelihood of identifying people who consumed wild meat given the
 population size of these towns/cities.  Questionnaires
 were administered in French but were translated into English where
 necessary, covering both official languages in Cameroon. The research team
 facilitated the completion of the questionnaire by reading the questions
 aloud to respondents and inputting their responses on the phones/tablets
 on their behalf. On average, the questionnaire took less than 15 minutes
 to complete with each respondent. Each team of three separately
 administered the questionnaire with different respondents at the same time
 to maximise the number of respondents that could complete the
 questionnaire at once. We excluded those who stated they did not eat wild
 meat from our sample. The questionnaire was developed and deployed using
 KoBoToolbox (2018) and loaded onto tablets and smartphones.
description: # Urban wild meat consumption across southern forested Cameroon and the
 limited effect of COVID-19 on wild meat consumption patterns
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.931zcrjt5](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.931zcrjt5) These data are the result of a street-intercept questionnaire study among urban wild meat consumers in 20 towns and cities in Cameroon. ## Description of the data and file structure All data are stored in one Excel spreadsheet (.xlsx), where each row represents the data from one respondent and each column represents a question. Not all respondents answered all questions - these answers have NA as the response. All column names are described in the tab 'Columns' of the Excel data file. We have removed some indirect identifiers of respondents (Ethnicity, Education, and Monthly Income) so that our dataset contains no more than three indirect identifiers, and therefore complies with the Dyrad Best Practices: Sharing Human Subjects Data guidance.