Urban wild meat consumption across southern forested Cameroon and the limited effect of COVID-19 on wild meat consumption patterns

Overexploitation of wildlife is pervasive in many tropical regions, and in addition to being a significant conservation and sustainability concern, it has received global attention given discussions over the origins of zoonotic disease outbreaks. Where unsustainable, consumption of wild meat by urban residents has been identified as a major socio-environmental challenge, given it is a significant driver of wildlife declines. Yet, information on urban wild meat consumers and possible ways to target conservation interventions remains lacking. Using one of the largest datasets of urban wild meat consumers (1,391) collected through structured questionnaires in 20 towns and cities, we model the demographic, psychographic, and spatial factors associated with wild meat consumption patterns in Cameroon. We find that nearly half of the sampled consumers ate wild meat once per week or more, and find that the probability of being a frequent consumer was greater among men, those living in smaller t..., We conducted a structured questionnaire study in 20 towns and cities located in four regions (Centre, East, Littoral, and South) across the forested southern half of Cameroon in August 2021. We formed teams of three researchers each, and each team was assigned to one region. Whilst teams were allocated to a given region, they also sampled towns and cities strategically if they were located along roads between allocated regions. In small towns, respondents were recruited to the study using the street-intercept method (Buschmann, 2019), whereby pedestrians were approached in the street. A semi-random sampling method was adopted, whereby researcher teams randomly approached pedestrians near central market areas and actively attempted to recruit men and women of all age groups evenly to improve sample representativeness. The same method was used in medium, large, and very large towns/cities, but we targeted our sampling efforts to areas where wild meat is sold to maximise the likelihood of ..., , # Urban wild meat consumption across southern forested Cameroon and the limited effect of COVID-19 on wild meat consumption patterns

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.931zcrjt5](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.931zcrjt5)

These data are the result of a street-intercept questionnaire study among urban wild meat consumers in 20 towns and cities in Cameroon.

## Description of the data and file structure

All data are stored in one Excel spreadsheet (.xlsx), where each row represents the data from one respondent and each column represents a question. Not all respondents answered all questions - these answers have NA as the response. All column names are described in the tab 'Columns' of the Excel data file. We have removed some indirect identifiers of respondents (Ethnicity, Education, and Monthly Income) so that our dataset contains no more than three indirect identifiers, and therefore complies with the Dyrad Best Practices: Sharing Human Subjects Data guidance.