Personalized Messaging May Help Reduce Harmful Wildlife Feeding In National Parks

Despite widespread attempts to deter national park visitors from feeding wildlife within park boundaries, the dangerous, potentially harmful practice continues. Messages warning against feeding wildlife in national parks often appeal to visitors’ sense of responsibility, but one study has suggested that a more personalized approach could provide better results.

The 2025 study (attached) looked at 232 media materials across nine national parks, including brochures, signage, social media, and flyers. In analyzing the materials, the study hoped to identify the messaging strategies being used and the frequency at which they occur in order to better understand the communication strategies being used at national parks, as well as their efficacy.

Getting visitors to stop feeding wildlife is a matter of safety for the animals, but also for the visitors themselves. When animals become accustomed to being fed, they can lose their fear of people and even become aggressive when they don’t receive food. In the most extreme cases, visitors have been seriously injured by aggressive animals that had gotten used to being fed.

How messages are framed in parks is important, considering that what is highlighted will ultimately determine how the recipient engages with the message, and ultimately how well they listen. Messages can be framed in ways that appeal to emotion, normative influence, or the benefits or costs of a behavior, among others.

For example, emotional appeals are designed to elicit a specific emotional reaction to motivate certain behaviors. In contrast, rational appeals emphasize objective language and provide information.

Normative appeals draw attention to acceptable or “normal” social behavior and perceptions of others, which can serve as guides for our own behavior. Normative appeals may center on others’ approval or disapproval of a behavior, or they may emphasize the existing behavior of others. The difference is subtle but important. An example of a subjective norm would be “Other campers support properly storing food away from wildlife,” while a message with a descriptive norm appeal may say, “Most campers use bear resistant canisters to store food.”

Many of the materials analyzed in the study mirrored the traditional ethic of interpretation and park stewardship with responsibility and rational appeals and wildlife centered messaging.

Interestingly, previous research found that messaging designed with personal benefits increased compliance with wildlife viewing distance guidelines. This kind of messaging promotes potential positive outcomes of certain behaviors. In the case of wildlife feeding, messaging that aims to decrease this behavior would focus on depicting the witnessing of natural wildlife behavior as a positive outcome of not feeding (i.e., healthy wildlife, relaxation or fun).

According to the study, about 52 percent of the materials contained this kind of “promotion” messaging. Comparatively, about 62 percent of the materials contained rational appeals.

The study notes that only 3.44 percent of the materials employed visitor experience framing, despite research demonstrating this approach significantly increases compliance. The parks also missed opportunities to leverage social proof and peer influence mechanisms proven effective in park contexts in many of the materials.

The study found that parks tended to rely too heavily on wildlife-consequence framing and underutilized visitor-benefit approaches, suggesting that parks may be missing opportunities to connect with visitor motivations in heading off harmful behaviors. Instead of defaulting to duty-based messaging and potentially limiting effectiveness, the study suggests that parks could integrate more messages personalized to the visitor experience.

“By combining rational and emotional appeals, parks can enhance visitors’ understanding surrounding preferred behaviors and encourage a conservation ethic, both of which are core objectives of the NPS interpretive framework,” states the study.

According to the study, when messages frame wildlife feeding guidelines in terms of immediate, personal outcomes rather than abstract consequences, visitors may be more motivated to comply as it feels more relevant to their own experience.