Event Details:

WILD-HARVESTED MEAT IN SOCIETY UNDER DIFFER-ENT MARKET SYSTEMS: A CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARI-SON BETWEEN SWEDEN AND MICHIGAN

Shawn Riley, Ph.D. Parish Storrs Lovejoy Professor of Wildlife Management MSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife

We live in a time when numbers of hunters are decreasing, populations of large mammals are abundant, and public interest in wild-harvested food is expanding. With the aim of exploring new strategies for managing deer, I explore wild-harvested meat as food through a comparison of data from Sweden, where hunters can sell meat into commercial marketplaces, and Michigan where sale of deer meat is illegal. Wild-harvested meat derived from wildlife is consumed, shared, bartered, traded, and consumed for its nutritional, economic, ecological, and sociocultural importance in societies throughout the world. Comparable data from Sweden and Michigan suggest that the culturally significant acts of sharing and consumption of wild-harvested meat result in starkly similar positive effects on attitudes toward wildlife and hunting in non-subsistence communities within rural and urban settings. Although Sweden and Michigan have markedly different approaches to wildlife governance –laws, policies and regulation affecting the exchange of wild-harvested deer meat – an increase in rate of consumption of wild-harvested meat in both settings was correlated with positive attitudes of non-hunters toward hunting in parallel patterns. Despite no formal U.S. markets in wild-harvested deer meat, it is widely shared and distributed beyond the population of hunters at rates and extents comparable to Sweden with correspondingly similar effects.
Bio: Dr. Riley is Parish Storrs Lovejoy Professor of Wildlife Management in the MSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, and a scientist in the Partnership for Ecosystem Research and Management sponsored by Michigan's Department of Natural Resources. He is also a faculty affiliate with the MSU Center for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, and an Adjunct Professor of Practice at Virginia Tech University’s Center for Environmental Security. During 2009-2010, Dr. Riley served as a Senior Fulbright Fellow to Sweden. In 2022, he returned to Sweden as a Fulbright Specialist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå.
Friday,
Mar 24, 2023 12:00 PM (ET)
302 International Center 427 N Shaw Ln, East Lansing, MI 48824
Online viewers register here:
bit.ly/3XWaTnJ
Sponsored by: Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES ) and Department of Fisheries and Wildlife
CERES Brown Bag Talk:
WILD-HARVESTED MEAT IN SOCIETY UNDER DIFFER-ENT MARKET SYSTEMS: A CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARI-SON BETWEEN SWEDEN AND MICHIGAN Shawn Riley, Ph.D. Parish Storrs Lovejoy Professor of Wildlife Management MSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife