By Joshua W. Morse,, Cheryl E. Morse, Daniel F. Pratson and Rachelle K. Gould.

Read the full paper here

The reasons that people care about wildlife are often simplified to extremes like: “because of what wildlife do for people,” and “because wildlife matter for their own sake.” An alternative is plural valuation. Plural valuation uses three types of value to look beyond extremes and capture both value conflicts and overlaps. However, methods and examples of how plural valuation can help stakeholders with different values work together are scarce.

This study uses a new storytelling method to uncover the ways that people value coyotes, and to suggest how wildlife managers can use this information to adapt their approach to the controversy around coyotes in Vermont, a small rural state in the northeastern United States.

We trained high school students to collect short interviews about coyotes from members of their communities. We used the prompt “please tell me a story about an experience you’ve had with coyotes in Vermont,” and followed up with questions about why that story was meaningful. Of the 150 coyote stories we collected, 73% mentioned instrumental values that focus on what coyotes do for people. Additionally, 32% mentioned intrinsic values that focus on how coyotes matter for their own sake, and 28% mentioned relational values that focus on what is important about how humans and coyotes interact with each other. Almost one third of interviewees (32%) mentioned multiple kinds of values. The graphic below shows how one farmer talked about all three value types in his stories about running a livestock operation in coyote country.

The policy and media conversation about coyotes in Vermont is focused on competing instrumental and intrinsic values, but our results show that these values can overlap and that Vermonters also hold relational values about coyotes. We recommend that wildlife managers be alert for situations where two extremes do not tell the whole story, amplify the voices of stakeholders who hold multiple values, and prioritize management approaches that meet multiple values. Our results and recommendations are drawn from a specific human-wildlife relationship, but should be relevant to wildlife managers dealing with other controversial species.