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

RESEARCH ARTICLE The Customer Isn't Always Right— Conservation and Animal Welfare Implications of the Increasing Demand for Wildlife Tourism Tom P. Moorhouse1*, Cecilia A. L. Dahlsjö1, Sandra E. Baker1, Neil C. D'Cruze1,2, David W. Macdonald1 1 Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Recanati-Kaplan Centre, Tubney, United Kingdom, 2 World Animal Protection (formerly the World Society for the Protection of Animals), London, United Kingdom * Abstract OPEN ACCESS Citation: Moorhouse TP, Dahlsjö CAL, Baker SE, D'Cruze NC, Macdonald DW (2015) The Customer Isn't Always Right—Conservation and Animal Welfare Implications of the Increasing Demand for Wildlife Tourism. PLoS ONE 10(10): e0138939. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0138939 Editor: Paul Adam, University of New South Wales, AUSTRALIA Received: May 6, 2015 Accepted: September 4, 2015 Published: October 21, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Moorhouse et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: This study was funded by World Animal Protection (http://www.worldanimalprotection.org.uk). SB was supported by the Humane Society International, UK and The Baker Trust during preparation of this manuscript. One author (NCDC) occupies a shared role between World Animal Protection and University of Oxford, and contributed to the experimental design, some aspects of the data collection and writing of the manuscript. The bulk of data collection, refining the study design and all of the 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. Introduction Tourism is a major global economic driver which in 2013 was worth over a trillion US dollars, accounted for 9% of global GDP, and provided 1 in 11 jobs worldwide [1]. International tourist arrivals have continually increased from 25 million in 1950 to 1087 million in 2013, with 1.8 billion predicted by 2030 [1]. Although there are no reliable global measures of the economic impact of wildlife tourism (tourism specifically based on encounters with non-domesticated animals) [2], it is the leading foreign exchange earner in several countries [3] and attending wildlife tourist attractions (WTAs) is a prime tourist motivation [2]. For example in 2006 approximately 2.2 million of Australia’s inbound tourists visited WTAs, representing 43% of all their international tourists [4], and one study concluded that wildlife tourism in 1988 accounted for 20–40 percent of international tourism globally [5]. Wildlife tourism represents a significant proportion of a huge global market that is predicted to increase in the coming decades. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0138939 October 21, 2015 1 / 15 Conservation and Welfare Impacts of Wildlife Tourism analyses were carried out by TPM and CALD. The decision to publish was made jointly, and the authors are satisfied that the work represents an objective, impartial and fair assessment of the subject area. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. WTAs are extremely diverse, but can be divided into four broad categories [2]: wildlifewatching tourism (viewing or otherwise interacting with free-ranging animals); captive-wildlife tourism (viewing animals in human-made confinement; principally zoos, wildlife parks, animal sanctuaries and aquaria, but also includes circuses and shows by mobile wildlife exhibitors); hunting tourism; fishing tourism. These types of wildlife tourism are either non-consumptive, e.g. bird watching, whale and dolphin watching, aquariums and wildlife parks [6], or consumptive—involving animals being deliberately killed or removed, or having their body parts used [7]—e.g. hunting and fishing [2]. WTAs can provide opportunities and livelihoods for the local human population [8] and can also secure long-term conservation of wildlife and wildlife habitats [2, 4, 6] through practical conservation efforts by volunteers and operators, the creation of local socio-economic incentives for the preservation of wildlife and their habitats [9, 10], and tourist education, which may promote positive attitudes towards species preservation and animal welfare, and increase future conservation revenue through future philanthropic donations [11–13]. Conversely, improperly managed WTAs can have an array of negative impacts on both the conservation and welfare status of subject taxa and individuals, whether in the wild or captivity [2, 3]. These impacts include removal of individuals from wild populations, injury, disease and death [2, 14], short- and long-term animal behavioural changes [14–18], stress and aberrant physiological responses [2, 3, 19–21], altered feeding and reproductive behaviour [3, 16, 22] and habitat alteration / loss [3, 14]. All WTAs at least partially trade-off values of conservation, animal welfare, visitor satisfaction and profitability [3, 20]. Tourists’ individual motivations and awareness will determine what they are willing to accept [3, 23, 24], but WTAs may have impacts that are difficult to detect [25] and some may foster a deliberate disconnect between their stated conservation or welfare credentials, and what they deliver in practice [26, 27]. Given the recent—and expected future—global increases in wildlife tourism, there is a pressing need to audit the diversity of WTAs and their impacts, positive, neutral or negative, on the conservation and welfare status of the animals involved, and to understand tourists' perceptions of WTAs in relation to an objective assessment of their impacts [3], to highlight areas in which tourist education may be beneficial. A number of recent studies has reviewed the impacts of individual WTA types [15, 25, 26], but no attempt has been made to describe the diversity o (...truncated)