Land Use History and Local Beliefs Shape Animal Contact in Congo Forest

Pathogenic spillovers from animals into humans have triggered epidemics throughout history, and one of the key factors behind such events—human-animal contact—remains poorly understood. Many current studies overlook how human-animal engagements vary across ecological zones and how broader processes bring people, animals, and pathogens into contact. A new mixed-methods investigation addressed this gap in a fragmented forest landscape of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a region recognized as a hotspot of both biodiversity and disease emergence.

The research team worked in three villages situated along an ecological gradient of forest fragmentation. Twenty-four village participants recorded their daily activities and their contacts with animal species over five months. The researchers developed a cluster analysis to categorize classes of animals according to the type and frequency of contact, and they conducted transects to estimate the abundance of animal species in relation to village proximity. They then tested the influence of species abundance, human activities, gender, and village on contact frequency. Alongside this quantitative work, they carried out ethnographic and ethnohistorical interviews and observations to explore how human-animal relations have changed over time.

Participants reported both physical and environmental contact with 61 animal species, which clustered into three distinct classes according to their contact profiles. The relative abundance of animal species was associated with contact frequency, but the effect was weak. This finding suggests that simply knowing how many animals of a given species live near a village does not reliably predict how often people will encounter them.

The ethnohistorical and anthropological analyses placed these contacts within longer-term processes and sociocultural practices that the statistical models could not capture. The animals with which participants had the most frequent contact were those whose abundance and accessibility resulted from decades of land use change and hunting intensification. In other words, the contact patterns observed today are shaped by historical transformations of the landscape and by shifting human practices, not merely by present-day ecology.

The study also revealed the power of local categorizations in mediating contact. Several abundant species were rarely contacted because local classifications of certain animals as ngeyi—”disgusting”—suppressed contacts that proximity alone would have predicted. Cultural meanings, therefore, can override what species abundance data would suggest about exposure risk.

The authors conclude that human-animal contact profiles are historically produced and socioculturally mediated, and that they cannot be derived exclusively from species ecology, land cover, or demographic variables. For understanding potential exposures to zoonotic pathogens, this means that models built only on ecological and demographic data may miss crucial dimensions of how people actually engage with animals. The findings underscore the value of combining quantitative contact measurements with ethnographic and ethnohistorical research when assessing the factors that shape human-animal contact in fragmented forest landscapes such as those of the DRC.

Subject of Research: Human-animal contact and zoonotic pathogen exposure along a forest fragmentation gradient in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Article Title: Contact in context: How land use histories, sociocultural practices, and animal profiles shape human-animal contact and zoonotic pathogen exposure in a fragmented forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo

Article References: Duda, R., Narat, V., Langlois, T., Monfura, R., Tang, M. A., Mbala, P., Monghiemo, C., & Giles-Vernick, T. (2026). Contact in context: How land use histories, sociocultural practices, and animal profiles shape human-animal contact and zoonotic pathogen exposure in a fragmented forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo. PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, 20(10), e0013823. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0013823

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0013823

Keywords: zoonotic spillover, human-animal contact, forest fragmentation, Democratic Republic of Congo, ethnohistory, hunting, land use change, biodiversity, disease emergence, mixed methods, cultural classification, wildlife