Quantifying the Influence of Emotions on Management Acceptability for White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus)

Emotions pervade human-wildlife relationships across social identities and cultures. Yet research on how emotions influence the cognitive processing of wildlife encounters remains sparse. In this study, we quantify the role of anticipated emotions in processing hypothetical encounters with white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). In 2021, we surveyed Indiana residents about deer and deer management (n = 1.806). Under four hypothetical deer encounters, we estimated the structural relationships among respondents' general attitudes toward deer, mutualism wildlife beliefs, scenario-specific emotions, and scenario-specific lethal control acceptability. Emotions mediated 14% of the effect of general attitudes on lethal control acceptability when encountering a fawn and completely mediated this effect when encountering a diseased deer. Our findings suggest that emotions work together with cognitions to process stimuli in a human-wildlife encounter and make a normative decision. Accounting for emotions in decision-making will help practitioners develop more effective and socially accepted approaches to wildlife conservation and management.