Predictive potential of wildlife value orientations for acceptability of management interventions

tWildlife value orientations are patterns of basic beliefs that give direction and meaning to fundamentalvalues in the context of wildlife. Wildlife value orientations can help managers estimate public eval-uations to management interventions. Their usefulness, both practically and scientifically, depends ontheir predictive potential. This article examined the predictive value of wildlife value orientations on theacceptability of wildlife management interventions in different situations. The situations varied in (a)severity of the human wildlife problem and (b) severity of the interventions for wildlife. Two wildlifevalue orientations were measured: domination (human needs have priority over wildlife well-being, 10items) and mutualism (rights are assigned to wildlife, 9 items). Acceptability was measured as a dichoto-mous variable for management interventions across 5 different situations. The predictive value of wildlifevalue orientations was largest for acceptability of the most severe interventions (hunting, 35–42% of vari-ance explained), followed by the least severe interventions (doing nothing, 5–17%) and the intermediateinterventions (shaking eggs or applying contraceptives, 1–9%) in the scenarios that include a problemfor humans. Value priorities appear to be an integral feature of value orientations. Intermediate inter-ventions do not harm wildlife, but might solve the problem caused by wildlife. Such interventions alsocreate minimal small internal value conflicts. Orientations that prioritize values and offer a template forconflict resolution are likely to have less predictive potential for these interventions.