Abstract
Flagships remain a key approach for motivating and mobilizing conservation actions and interests. This study quantified attitudes towards two endemic globally threatened Amazona parrots, one of which was developed as a popular flagship in the 1980s. We used a mixed methods approach that included qualitative and quantitative interviewing and a newspaper content analysis to provide empirical evidence that the process of creating this conservation flagship inadvertently fostered negative attitudes and behaviors towards its non-flagship congener. We argue that, similar to other commercially branded goods and services, popular conservation flagships can produce powerful standards of comparison that may decrease the attractiveness and public acceptance of non-flagship species. These results parallel findings from the fields of consumer research and marketing psychology showing that “top-of-the-line” products may hurt sibling models. We therefore suggest that this is an important unintended consequence of the flagship approach and encourage the conservation community to learn from commercial brand developers who have been wary of the potential for exclusionary contrast effects of flagship brand deployment.
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All these emerged after the beginning of the ‘Project Sisserou’ parrot education program.
Historian Lennox Honychurch remarked that this might have been particularly true of Dominicans living in the island’s more populated south, a region where it is believed that the Sisserou has been relatively rare during recorded history.
We noted the contradiction in respondents’ description of their more colorful (historical) Jaco parrot pets, an indication that historically it was the Jaco that was perceived as the more attractive, while the Sisserou was described as “all dark”(and not colorful) in these retrospective accounts.
These statements were not in response to our questions. We therefore believe that it is highly likely that these perspectives volunteered during interviews are most likely much more common among the population than our percentages reflect.
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Acknowledgments
This research was conducted under the auspices of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, American Museum of Natural History (AMNH); Columbia University; and the Forestry, Wildlife, and Parks Division, Dominica. Major funding was provided by Loro Parque Fundación and Rufford Small Grants for Nature. Support was also received from Idea Wild. LRD thanks his dissertation committee for their invaluable guidance: Ana Luz Porzecanski, Paige West, Eleanor Sterling, Joshua Ginsberg, and Gary Winkel. This manuscript also benefited greatly from the input of the following reviewers: Lennox Honychurch, Herbert Raffaele, Thomas. W. Sherry, Eleanor Sterling, and Livingston A. White. We thank our many respondents and key informants for their time and gracious hospitality. Arlington James, Limbert Smith, and Machel Sultan provided invaluable logistical and administrative support throughout this project.
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Communicated by Peter Bridgewater.
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Douglas, L.R., Winkel, G. The flipside of the flagship. Biodivers Conserv 23, 979–997 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-014-0647-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-014-0647-0