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

Pathogenic spillovers from animals into humans have catalyzed epidemics throughout history. They result from multiple factors. One such factor, human-animal contact, remains poorly understood. Current studies often neglect variability in human-animal engagements across ecological zones and the broader processes bringing people, animals, and pathogens into engagement. We investigated factors and longer-term processes shaping human-animal contacts and indirectly, potential exposures to zoonotic pathogens in a fragmentated forest. We conducted our mixed-methods investigation in three villages along an ecological gradient of forest fragmentation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a hotspot of biodiversity and disease emergence. Twenty-four village participants recorded their daily activities and contacts with animal species over five months. We developed a cluster analysis to categorize classes of animals according to type and frequency of contact and conducted transects to estimate animal species abundance according to village proximity. We then tested the influence of species abundance, human activities, gender, and village on contact frequency. We also undertook ethnographic and ethnohistorical interviews and observations to explore changing human-animal relations. Participants had physical and environmental contact with 61 animal species, which clustered into three classes according to their contact profiles. Relative abundance of animal species was associated with contact frequency, but its effects were weak. Our ethnohistorical and anthropological analyses, however, situated these contacts within their longer-term processes and sociocultural practices that our models could not capture. The animals with which participants had most frequent contact were those whose abundance and accessibility resulted from decades of land use change and hunting intensification. Several abundant species were rarely contacted because local categorizations of animals as ngeyi (“disgusting”) suppressed contacts that proximity alone would have predicted. Human-animal contact profiles are thus historically produced and socioculturally mediated; they cannot be derived exclusively from species ecology, land cover, or demographic variables.