Newspaper Coverage and Framing of Bats, and Their Impact on Readership Engagement

The media is a valuable pathway for transforming people's attitudes towards conservation issues. Understanding how bats are framed in the media is hence essential for bat conservation, particularly considering the recent fearmongering and misinformation about the risks posed by bats. We reviewed bat-related articles published online no later than 2019 (before the recent COVID19 pandemic), in 15 newspapers from the five most populated countries in Western Europe. We examined the extent to which bats were presented as a threat to human health and the assumed general attitudes towards bats that such articles supported. We quantified press coverage on bat conservation values and evaluated whether the country and political stance had any information bias. Finally, we assessed their terminology and, for the first time, modelled the active response from the readership based on the number of online comments. Out of 1095 articles sampled, 17% focused on bats and diseases, 53% on a range of ecological and conservation topics, and 30% only mention bats anecdotally. While most of the ecological articles did not present bats as a threat (97%), most articles focusing on diseases did so (80%). Ecosystem services were mentioned on very few occasions in both types (< 30%), and references to the economic benefits they provide were meagre (< 4%). Disease-related concepts were recurrent, and those articles that framed bats as a threat were the ones that garnered the highest number of comments. Therefore, we encourage the media to play a more proactive role in reinforcing positive conservation messaging by presenting the myriad ways in which bats contribute to safeguarding human well-being and ecosystem functioning.

Trading Animal Lives: Ten Tricky Issues on the Road to Protecting Commodified Wild Animals

Wildlife commodification can generate benefits for biodiversity conservation, but it also has negative impacts; overexploitation of wildlife is currently one of the biggest drivers of vertebrate extinction risk. In the present article, we highlight 10 issues that in our experience impede sustainable and humane wildlife trade. Given humanity's increasing demands on the natural world we question whether many aspects of wildlife trade can be compatible with appropriate standards for biodiversity conservation and animal welfare, and suggest that too many elements of wildlife trade as it currently stands are not sustainable for wildlife or for the livelihoods that it supports. We suggest that the onus should be on traders to demonstrate that wildlife use is sustainable, humane, and safe (with respect to disease and invasion risk), rather than on conservationists to demonstrate it is not, that there is a need for a broad acceptance of responsibility and, ultimately, widespread behavior change. We urge conservationists, practitioners, and others to take bold, progressive steps to reach consensus and action.