More than 700 sports teams around the world cheer on wildlife mascots, the majority of which are declining or endangered species. With the prominent role that sports play in cultures around the globe, researchers argue that wildlife mascots might be a powerful, untapped resource for conservation.
In a recent study published in BioScience, an international team of researchers analyzed patterns of mascot representation around the globe. The Wild League, a project inspired by the research, brings together fans, teams and researchers to help protect the wildlife featured in some of the world’s most beloved sports teams. Its website hosts an interactive map where users can explore 727 professional teams in 50 countries that use animal emblems.
The Wildlife Society spoke with Corey Bradshaw, a professor of global ecology at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, and coauthor of the study, about the trends he found in wildlife mascot representation and how our love of sports could bring about positive change for the species represented.
Why study sports from a conservation lens?
The leader of this specific project is Ugo Arbieu at the Université Paris-Saclay, who is both a mad keen rugby fan and a really good scientist. He’s one of those guys that’ll be at a pub and start spitting out statistics for each team. He basically married his two passions and created The Wild League.
In many countries, sport is a big part of people’s lives. Although packed stadiums pull in millions of dollars each night in ticket sales alone, there are a few examples of teams that have meaningfully invested in conservation work. There’s also a massive social engineering potential that’s underexploited. Sport can change the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of—in the true sense of the word—fanatical people by making the plight of the animals that are represented by these teams more visible. And that’s probably more important than even channeling money to conservation programs.
What trends did you find in mascot representation around the world?
In terms of documenting the animals themselves, we struggled a lot with the taxonomy because in some cases it was quite vague, especially for invertebrates. We tried to be as specific as possible, but in some cases, we only identified animals down to order. As we discovered in the paper, a lot of teams are actually known by wildlife nicknames that aren’t necessarily the official team name. And we only looked at animals, not plants, which are also popular, like New Zealand’s women’s national rugby team, the Silver Ferns.
We discovered that choosing a local species isn’t the default option for many clubs. Teams in Africa and Asia were more likely to choose a local species, but for teams in Europe, the Americas and Oceania, the probability was only around 50%. Mammals and birds were the most represented classes, with lions (Panthera leo), tigers (Panthera tigris) and gray wolves (Canis lupus) the most frequently selected species.
This trend might be explained by the fact that team mascots usually represent some sort of prowess, strength or capability and can go back thousands, if not tens of thousands of years, sometimes to when those species were actually present in a certain area. There were lions (Panthera leo) and straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) in Europe thousands of years ago. But even though fans might not see a certain species in the wild, they can still capitalize on the feelings the fans have for their team.
How can teams be effective drivers of conservation?
I think we have a lot more opportunity with new teams coming into leagues, as opposed to well-established ones. And it involves not just the social dimensions of wildlife conservation but branding psychology as well. Tasmania just has a new Australian rules football team called the Devils, named after the Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii). We found that threatened and declining species like the Tasmanian devil are more represented than common species, but common species are useful. Just because something is common now doesn’t mean it’s not going to be threatened in the future. Maintaining healthy populations of animals that are still doing alright is also a priority.
The danger, of course, is greenwashing—and there’s been a lot of it out there—because there is generally this corporate desire to come across as doing the responsible thing. If their shareholders and their fan bases are putting pressure on them as well, that’s even more of an incentive, because fan allegiance is essential to the brands and profit margins of what are essentially corporations.
An example of a campaign could be, for every dollar fans put in, the club will put a dollar toward the conservation of a species. You could do it actively with donations or passively through ticket sales. There are a lot of different mechanisms to do it, and it’s essentially marketing.
I went to a Montreal Canadiens game recently where there was a captive audience of 23,000 riled-up fans. You could use that opportunity to share information about conservation or request funds. Even if you change the thinking of a small fraction of the people there, that’s meaningful.
Article by Olivia Milloway
