Did rural children like more local animals than suburban children?

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Americans are spending fewer hours outdoors, a decline exacerbated by urbanization that has affected their familiarity with local wildlife. This concerns conservationists because people tend to care about and invest in what they know. Children are future supporters of conservation, and their knowledge of and feelings toward wildlife could influence conservation for years to come. Yet little research has examined children's attitudes toward wildlife, especially across zones of urbanization.

Researchers surveyed 2,759 children in grades 4–8 at 22 suburban, exurban, and rural schools in North Carolina about their attitudes toward local, domestic, and exotic animals. They predicted that children living in rural or exurban areas, who might have more direct access to more wildlife species, would list more local animals as liked and fewer as scary than suburban children.

Instead, regardless of where they lived, children gave mostly non-native mammals in open-ended responses and were more likely to list local animals as scary than as liked. Urbanization had little effect on the number of local animals listed, and rankings of liked animals were correlated across urbanization zones. A promising finding for conservation was that half of the top liked animals included species or taxonomic groups containing threatened or endangered species.

The researchers concluded that, across different levels of urbanization, children were unfamiliar with and/or had a low preference for local animals. They suggested that a disconnect between children and local biodiversity is already well established, even in more rural areas where many wildlife species can be found.