Regardless of where you live, I am sure one of your local sports teams has an animal for a mascot. And why not? Animals embody much of what we associate with sports: strength, resilience, tenacity, and power. A recent study from Bioscience found that across 50 countries and 10 different sports, “727 professional [sports] organizations used wild animals in their names, logos, or fan nicknames”. Yet, the most frequently represented species, “lions, tigers, grey wolves, leopards, and brown bears,” are all threatened or endangered in the wild. In fact, threatened species “were selected as mascots significantly more than other animals or symbols”.
A researcher at the Paris-Saclay University in France, Ugo Arbieu, first noticed this trend while playing Madden. He said that animal imagery is everywhere in the game, and he just couldn’t ignore this nagging feeling that sports had an untapped potential for conservation. Through his research into world sport organizations, he identified that “161 distinct animal taxa [are] represented… spanning mammals, birds, insects, sharks, and more”.
Inspired to help these teams support the animals that represent them, Arbieu created The Wild League. His organization provides a framework to “rally sports clubs, sponsors, and fans around biodiversity conservation”. Their website even has an interactive map of teams across the world that use endangered animals as their mascots. By connecting these teams with conservation specialists and organizations, The Wild League hopes to achieve its goals of supporting biodiversity research, protecting habitats, educating fans, and, most importantly, funding wildlife protection projects.
Arbieu was not the first to identify this potential collaboration. The Tigers United program is a “consortium of universities linked by their tiger mascots and a shared commitment to tiger conservation,” with Clemson University in South Carolina as one of the members. The director of Tigers United, Greg Yarrow, who is also a wildlife ecology faculty member at Clemson, says, “We are using athletics as the megaphone for conservation…If you have close to 90,000 individuals in a football stadium, and each contribute $1 to tiger conservation, that’s significant”. Similarly, the Saitama Seibu Lions baseball team in Japan celebrates World Lion Day every year on August 10 in an effort to educate fans. The team also supports conservation scientists working to increase the populations of wild lions in Africa.
Arbieu hopes The Wild League will make these types of partnerships mainstream, saying, “I really, sincerely believe that the community of fans around professional sports clubs, their identity is developed through attachment to these symbols…and these symbols are the colors, the jersey and the emblem and the mascot. It’s really a rallying point”. I believe that for many people who enjoy sports, real-world animals are not our first thought when we hear people talking about “the tigers… the lions… the bears,” but it should be. Human actions are having a direct impact on the survival of these species, and if we don’t want them all to go the way of the dodo, more sports teams need to follow the example set by The Wild League and Tigers United.
