The Customer Isn't Always Right-Conservation and Animal Welfare Implications of the Increasing Demand for Wildlife Tourism

Abstract

Tourism accounts for 9% of global GDP and comprises 1.1 billion tourist arrivals per annum. Visits to wildlife tourist attractions (WTAs) may account for 20-40% of global tourism, but no studies have audited the diversity of WTAs and their impacts on the conservation status and welfare of subject animals. We scored these impacts for 24 types of WTA, visited by 3.6-6 million tourists per year, and compared our scores to tourists' feedback on TripAdvisor. Six WTA types (impacting 1,500-13,000 individual animals) had net positive conservation/welfare impacts, but 14 (120,000-340,000 individuals) had negative conservation impacts and 18 (230,000-550,000 individuals) had negative welfare impacts. Despite these figures only 7.8% of all tourist feedback on these WTAs was negative due to conservation/welfare concerns. We demonstrate that WTAs have substantial negative effects that are unrecognised by the majority of tourists, suggesting an urgent need for tourist education and regulation of WTAs worldwide.

Fig 1. Flow charts detailing the logic underpinning the allocation of a) conservation scores and b) welfare scores to types of wildlife tourist attractions (WTA types).

Final scores range from -3 to +3 and are indicated below the relevant boxes. LC, NT, VU, EN, CR indicate the IUCN Redlist status of the species (Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered). Please see accompanying information in S1 Appendix.

Fig 2. Welfare and conservation scores for the 24 selected WTA types.

BD = Bear dancing, BF = Bear bile farms, BP = Bear parks, BS = Bear sanctuary, CC = Civet coffee, CF = Crocodile farms, DC = Captive dolphin interactions, DM = Dancing macaques, DS = Dolphin sanctuary, DW = Wild dolphin interactions, EP = Elephant parks, ES = Elephant sanctuary, GT = Gorilla trekking, GW = Gibbon watching, HM = Hyena men (Nigeria), LE = Lion encounters, LS = Lion sanctuary, OS = Orang-utan sanctuary, PW = Polar bear watching, SC = Snake charming, SD = Shark cage diving, SF = Sea turtle farm, TF = Tiger farms, TI = Tiger interactions.

Fig 3. Tourist dissatisfaction scores from TripAdvisor reviews (measured as the percentage of all positive and negative reviews that were negative).

Bars represent the median, boxes the interquartile range, and asterisks outlying points. Numbers above each column, for reference, show the independently awarded conservation and welfare scores, respectively, for each attraction. “C” and “W” denote captive and wild dolphin interactions.