INTRO: The authors of this study examine a relationship that is becoming increasingly important as the world becomes more urbanised: the relationships between people and nature. Using a globally widespread phenomenon - dog ownership - the authors investigated whether the additional experience of nature that dog owners accrue while walking their dogs is linked to their attitude towards conservation. Interestingly, the increased time spent outdoors by dog owners was not related to their conservation attitude. There was, however, significant differences across cultures, suggesting there is a complex interaction of culture and attitude toward nature.
MERITS: The manuscript is firstly well-written and easily understood. The sample size of this study is outstanding, and the reliability of the results is thus difficult to question. The authors' use of cats, which do not increase an owner's experience of nature, as a 'pet control' is a particularly clever choice. The honesty of the null result about dog ownership not being related to conservation attitudes is refreshing.
CRITIQUE: None.
DISCUSSION: As the global human population increases and the world inevitably becomes more urbanised, our relationship with nature will in many ways determine the fate of ecosystems at the urban fringe. Because dog ownership is such a widespread phenomenon and involves people spending time outdoors, dog owners might represent an important source of public support for conservation initiatives. Of course the general findings suggest this is not the case, although there was a relationship between dog ownership and people's relatedness to nature. However, the considerable variation among cultures implies an interaction whereby dog ownership is important for increasing people's ecological awareness in some cultures but not others. Overall, this is a valuable case study for demonstrating the importance of considering culture in questions of social attitude.
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INTRO: The manuscript focuses on a cross-cultural study of the correlations between the quantity of individual experience of nature (EoN) and several measures of affective and cognitive relationship to nature : relatedness to nature, ecological literacy and conservation attitude Main results suggest that the quantity of EoN is not positively correlated with ecological literacy or conservation attitude and show significant differences in the links between EoN and affective and conginitve responses between cultural contexts.
MERITS: The topic is really important and the manuscript is well structured and written. The phenomenom of disconnection between people and nature might be a key to understantd current individual and collective behaviors and attitudes toward nature in developped countries. However, the extent of the phenomenon and the ways it impacts affective and cognitive responses remain unclear. This work is one of the rare studies that aim at disentangling the effects of quantity and quality of EoN on individual relationships to nature. What is more, very few studies on these questions present cross-cultural comparisons which makes it really interesting and important.
CRITIQUE: I aknowledge that it is very difficult to do in short abstracts but to me, the methodology should be detailed a bit further. Especially, authors should specify what variable is used as a proxy to evaluate EoN quantity as it is unclear throughout the manuscript whether it is "dog ownership", or another variable like frequency of outdoor activities (and in that case what activities? dog walking? other activities?). This would help better understand the relative importance of and interactions between "dog owning", "dog walking", "beein outdoor" and "being in nature" in the authors' pseudo-experiment design and thus clarify the results that are presented, especially those evoked in the title.
An aditionnal minor critique is about the result on differences between countries that would gain in interest if explained more specifically (what kind of differences ? between which countries?) although I realise the authors might have been constrained by the size of the abstract.
DISCUSSION: To me, this subject is really important and cross-cultural studies offer avenues (i) to work on large scale pseudo-experiment and (ii) to highlight both the diversity in human-nature relationships and in the links between these relationships and attitudes and behaviors towards nature. However, I am a bit confused about the conclusion of the manuscript on this particular matter. On one hand, the authors highlight the need for cross-cultural studies to overcome the shortcomings of study cases by "scaling-up" and acess general results on the outcomes of EoN, but on the other hand they state that a "one-size-fits-all" approach is unlikely to be apropriate because of local specificities... I would say that cross-cultural approches allows disentangling the effects of several factors that may be correlated in a country but not in another and thus give access to broad mecanisms of the links between EoN and affective and cognitive relationships to nature. However, regarding conservation policies, locally relevant specificities must be taken into account and policies should rely on thorough case studies. Both approaches are complementary.