Negative attitudes are associated with lethal control of rodents in an Indigenous Community from the temperate forest of Mexico

Rodents have been unwanted human commensals for millennia as they decimate crops and spread diseases. However, rodents perform essential ecosystem functions, which need to be known by the public to boost rodent conservation. Furthermore, knowledge about the transmission of diseases via ectoparasites enables safe coexistence between rodents and humans. We aimed to unpack the knowledge, attitudes and practices of indigenous people towards rodents and their ectoparasites. We conducted 108 in-person interviews with farmers and foresters from the indigenous community of Nuevo San Juan, Michoacan, Mexico. Attitudes towards rodents were divided, with 54% of the respondents having a positive attitude and 36% having a negative attitude. Very few respondents could name diseases associated to rodents (44%). Most respondents agreed that rodents have the right to live, enhancing the potential of management focused on the application of preventive measures rather than the lethal control of rodents., Study site. The study was conducted within the territory of the NSJIC (Figure 1). The NSJIC people are of Purepecha origin and historically inhabited a large portion of the State of Michoacan in west-central Mexico. Nowadays, they are concentrated in a region known as the Meseta Purepecha in the northwest portion of the state (INPI, 2019). The main town, Nuevo San Juan Parangaricutiro, was founded in 1944, after the population was relocated due to the Paricutin volcano emerging in their previous territory, in 1943 (Trask, 1943). Thus, the people from the NSJIC faced the challenge of adapting to extreme changes in their physical environment and new social contexts (Nolan, 1979). A large proportion of the NSJIC population lives in Nuevo San Juan Parangaricutiro, which has over 16,700 inhabitants (INEGI, 2020). People’s livelihoods in the area primarily revolve around forest use and management (Velázquez et al., 2015) and currently 2,300 landowners are registered for forest management acti..., , # Negative attitudes are associated with lethal control of rodents in an Indigenous Community from the temperate forest of Mexico

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.w6m905qwt](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.w6m905qwt)

Data sets contain information on the knowledge, attitudes and practices of 108 foresters and farmers, towards rodents in an indigenous community in Nuevo San Juan, Michoacan, Mexico.

## Description of the data and file structure

### File: 20240229_interviews_rodents_V3.csv

Description: Data on the answers of 108 respondents. The blanks throughout the answers represent questions that the respondent did not answer.

Variables:

* ID. Unique number that identifies each respondent.
* age. Age in years of the respondents.
* sex. Biological sex of the respondent, could be either man or woman (although the respondents could provide a different answer).
* education_level. Classified according to the Mexican education framework, being: primary (6-11 yo), secondary (12-14 yo), high-...,