Data for: Conservation scholars’ perspectives on the morality of trophy hunting for the sake of conservation

Trophy hunting is one of the most contentious issues in recent biodiversity conservation discourse, eliciting opposition and support for the practice. Ethical concerns are often at the heart of the debate.
To investigate moral views about trophy hunting, we conducted an online survey of randomly selected scholars worldwide who had published on biodiversity conservation (n = 2,315).
Scholars expressed divergent views on the moral acceptability of trophy hunting as a conservation practice. Moral convictions were significantly related to the perspectives
The most important factor in predicting the moral views of the respondents was the consequences of trophy hunting for local human communities.
The results also indicated that utilitarian (versus deontological) decision-making in conservation, ecological consequences of trophy hunting, and animal welfare issues contribute to the divergent views.
The findings emphasize the need for interdisciplinary work on ethical issues concerning animal rights and welfare in conservation, as well as providing robust and comprehensive evidence on the consequences of trophy hunting for local communities.
We caution that polarization among conservation scholars may negatively affect conservation efforts. Based on the literature and our findings, we provide some recommendations to narrow the gap and consider different management options.

Methods
In November and December 2020, we conducted a web-based survey of biodiversity conservation scholars who had published in the scientific literature since 2010. We used the publications listed in the 'Web of Science – All Databases' as the sampling frame and searched for publications using the search term: 'biodiversity conservation' OR 'wildlife conservation' OR 'conservation biology' OR 'trophy hunting' in the 'topic' field. We obtained the authors' email addresses from the same database and sent individualized email invitations with a link to the Web survey hosted by the Qualtrics survey platform. Qualtrics only accepted one response per link, avoiding the possibility of a respondent sharing their link with unidentified respondents. Two additional follow-up invitations were sent within two weeks of the initial invitation to those who did not respond to the earlier invitation. The instructions in the invitation email and survey noted that it was limited to the authors who had published work in the area of biodiversity conservation.

Additionally, at the beginning of the questionnaire, we asked the respondents if their work, study, or research was related to biodiversity conservation. Those who responded 'no' to this question were automatically excluded from the survey. We also asked the respondents to provide their opinions on trophy hunting in the context of the developing world. For clarity and consistency in the responses, the following definition of trophy hunting was provided to the respondents on multiple pages throughout the survey: “Trophy hunting is a type of selective recreational hunting of animals done to obtain their body parts as a representation of success or memorial,” with an emphasis on 'developing countries' (see Appendix S1). The Institutional Review Board of Texas A&M University approved the data collection protocols and the survey instrument (IRB2020-1228M).

Of the 26,064 scholars who received the invitation, 3,794 responded (response rate: 14.5%), and 2,430 completed the questionnaire (completion rate: 64.0%). We used the authors’ contact information at the time of publication. Many had likely changed their institutional affiliation since publication (beginning in 2010). We cannot discern how many authors had changed their affiliations and, consequently, did not receive the invitation. Furthermore, we only sent invitations to authors whose email addresses were available through the database (all co-authors).

After screening out responses from scholars whose work or research did not involve biodiversity conservation (n = 106) and those who did not answer our outcome variable (n = 9), we included 2,315 cases in the analyses.