Animal-linked holiday activities? Be very wary
While some readers may be on Easter holidays just now, others may be planning summer holidays. From close-up photos with tiger cubs, to swimming with dolphins, to bottle-feeding baby elephants, exotic creatures have become part of many people’s foreign travel trips. Many people – even genuine animal-lovers – don’t stop to think about the welfare implications of what they are witnessing.
The leading organisation campaigning on this important topic has been World Animal Protection: the charity has carried out extensive global research into the topic. Their strong arguments have persuaded TripAdvisor to stop taking bookings for entertainment involving unethical animal experiences, such as those involving captive wild animals or endangered species.
I was fortunate enough to visit Southern India and Sri Lanka myself recently, and I experienced my own examples of animal-linked tourism. I had realised that this was likely to happen – I was visiting areas that are the natural environments of elephants, in particular. So before I went, I did some research into the truth about such activities, and I was shocked at what I discovered.
There’s a great deal of misunderstanding about elephants: many people mistakenly believe that they are semi-domesticated. This is untrue: they have always been, and still are, wild animals.
Elephants that appear to be tame – such as those used for parades or as working animals – have been treated appallingly at some stage to create this illusion of docility. Baby elephants are often taken from their mothers in the wild when young, and harsh training methods are then used to intimidate them into submission. As they grow older and stronger, the domination-style training methods continue, with hooks and spikes on long sticks being used to poke the elephant in sensitive places to make them frightened of their handlers. And the elephants are often kept in miserable conditions, with their legs permanently in chains, and no opportunity to express their natural social behaviours.
In Sri Lanka, I was appalled by the conditions that I witnessed some elephants enduring, both when being used to give tourists a ride, and also when being used as ‘ temple elephants’. In both situations, they were chained up, rocking from side to side all the time, and with sores on their pressure points. I also saw elephants enjoying life in the wild in a nature reserve: this is how they should live. When you see them in groups, engaging with one another, it’s so obvious that this is how they should be allowed to live their lives. The bottom line is that it is wrong to undertake any activity that involves close contact with elephants, apart from a few specific situations. Common tourist activities such as elephant rides, washing, feeding, or ‘ being a mahout’ for a day should all be avoided.
Another popular tourist activity is swimming with dolphins which has become particularly popular in the Caribbean in the past decade. The attraction is easy to understand. Dolphins are intelligent, playful creatures, and it’s exciting to swim with them right beside you. The problem is that it is not so much fun for the dolphins themselves. Dolphins are wild creatures, so they need to be caught and caged to be used in captivity. During capture, individual dolphins may become entangled in the capture nets and suffocate or suffer stress-related conditions associated with the trauma of capture. In addition, captures from the wild can have a harmful effect on depleted
dolphin populations by removing breeding members from the group. At typical venues where they are used as entertainment, they are forced to swim in small pens all day long, pressurised to perform the same motions, the same speech, the same signals over and over. They get intensely frustrated, and while this may not be obvious to tourists, dolphin experts are in no doubt about the fact that they suffer as a consequence.
It’s far better to see dolphins in the wild, doing their own thing. I went on a whale watching trip, where our boat was surrounded by groups of leaping Skipper Dolphins. I felt exhilarated and emotional to see these remarkable animals in their own space: there was no need to be right up close to them.
Tigers are also popular amongst tourists: a recent study found a 33% increase in the number of tigers kept at tourist entertainment facilities over a five-year period. The main welfare concerns witnessed at the venues by investigators include the fact that tiger cubs cruelly separated from their mothers, just two to three weeks after they are born. These young cubs are then used as photo props with tourists, suffering stress and injury as they are manhandled many times a day. As they grow older, tigers are punished to reduce aggressive, unwanted behavior, and most are housed in small, concrete cages or barren enclosures with limited access to fresh water.
There are many other animal linked tourism activities, from circuses to zoos, to dancing bears and monkeys in the street. If you care about animals, you may feel drawn to engage with such happenings, but for the animals’ sake, don’t do it. Wild animals deserve to be in the wild, where they belong. Go and watch them in their own space; it’s the kindest way for the animals.