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The scope, scale, and socio-environmental impacts of wildlife crime pose diverse risks to people, animals, and environments. With direct knowledge of the persistence and dynamics of wildlife crime, protected area rangers can be both an essential source of information on, and front-line authority for, preventing wildlife crime. Beyond patrol and crime scene data collected by rangers, solutions to wildlife crime could be better built off the knowledge and situational awareness of rangers, in particular rangers' relationships with local communities and their unique ability to engage them. Rangers are often embedded in the communities surrounding the conserved areas which they are charged with protecting, which presents both challenges and opportunities for their work on wildlife crime prevention. Cultural brokerage refers to the process by which intermediaries, like rangers, facilitate interactions between other relevant stakeholders that are separate yet proximate to one another, or that lack access to, or trust in, one another. Cultural brokers can function as gatekeepers, representatives, liaisons, coordinators, or iterant brokers; these forms vary by how information flows and how closely aligned the broker is to particular stakeholders. The objectives of this paper are to use the example of protected area rangers in Viet Nam to (a) characterize rangers' cultural brokerage of resources, information, and relationships and (b) discuss ranger-identified obstacles to the prevention of wildlife crime as an example of brokered knowledge. Using in-depth face-to-face interviews with rangers and other protected area staff (N = 31, 71% rangers) in Pu Mat National Park, 2018, we found that rangers regularly shift between forms of cultural brokerage. We offer a typology of the diverse forms of cultural brokerage that characterize rangers' relationships with communities and other stakeholders. We then discuss ranger-identified obstacles to wildlife protection as an example of brokered knowledge. These results have implications for designing interventions to address wildlife crime that both improve community-ranger interactions and increase the efficiency of wildlife crime prevention.

The search for the origins of COVID-19 has yielded no conclusive evidence. In the face of this uncertainty, other social and political factors can influence perceptions of virus origins, which in turn can influence policy formation and global efforts to combat future pandemics. Vastly different COVID-19 origin stories may circulate both within the same country but also between different countries. This article examines COVID-19 origins debates as they circulate in China, drawing from a 974-respondent survey conducted in mainland China. Our results show that within China there is a strong belief that COVID-19 originated outside the country, either in the United States or Europe. This contrasts with mainstream media coverage in the United State and Europe, which generally holds that the virus most likely originated in China. Given such global dissonance, moving forward with pandemic prevention reforms is challenging. Yet, even in the face of such diverse beliefs, building support for reform is still possible. As the search for COVID-19 continues, policy reform can be pursued across a plurality of domains, including wet markets, the wildlife trade, cold-chain products, and gain-of-function virology research, all in the interest of preventing the next global pandemic.

Wildlife farming, the commercial breeding and legal sale of non-domesticated species, is an increasingly prevalent, persistently controversial, and understudied conservation practice. The adoption or rejection of wildlife farms is a complex process that incorporates numerous ethical considerations: conservation, livelihoods, animal welfare, and cultural practices. This paper uses qualitative interview data with key informants (academics) to analyze (a) the harms and benefits of wildlife farms and (b) the factors that influence whether wildlife farms are stigmatized or accepted. In evaluations of wildlife farming’s harms and benefits, respondents incorporated multiple considerations: animal welfare, environmental impacts, scale disparities between sustenance and commercial farms, consumer preferences, species differences, the substitutability and accessibility of wildlife products, and governance. The results further indicated that the stigmatization or acceptance of wildlife farms is affected by the “wildlife farm” label, if there is a stigma around use of a species, a form of production, or the perceived quality of a wildlife product, cultural differences in wildlife use, wildlife consumer typology, geopolitical factors, and demand reduction efforts. This paper analyzes the complexities of wildlife farming such that stakeholders can understand the impacts of this practice on species, human communities, individual animals, and the legal and illegal wildlife trades.

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