Bringing Animals in-to Wildlife Tourism

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to highlight animal stakeholders, evidenced-based best practices, care ethics, and compassion as essential components of sustainable wildlife tourism. These tenets stem from an animal geography lens, which is well-positioned for studies of animal-based tourism and transspecies caregiving. As a conceptual contribution, this paper presents a theory synthesis that ‘stays with the trouble’ of wildlife tourism and identifies ways to ‘bring animals in’. Our approach could be described as multispecies, critical, and socio-ecological. We argue that the trouble with wildlife tourism writ large includes nonhuman suffering and biodiversity loss, unethical and unevidenced practices, gaps in the knowledge of wildlife welfare, and limited engagement with animals as stakeholders. We then present four ways to ‘bring animals in’ as co-participants in wildlife tourism research and practice. This involves enfranchising animals as stakeholders in wildlife tourism, buttressed by ethics of care, best practices, and a commitment to improved outcomes along the conservation-welfare nexus. Finally, we consider the extent to which wildlife sanctuary tourism serves as a further problem or panacea that balances the conservation and welfare of wild animals. The result of our theory synthesis is the promotion of a more care-full and compassionate paradigm for wildlife tourism, which draws from diverse scholarships that contribute, conceptually and practically, to the underserved niches of wildlife welfare, rehabilitation, and sanctuary research.

1. Introduction

“Once one has been in touch, obligations and possibilities for response change”.

[1]

Reflecting on the rate at which biodiversity and wild habitats are rapidly declining worldwide, it is imperative to contemplate the spaces in which we interact with and relate to nonhuman animals (henceforth ‘animals’). Across numerous industries, humans engage animals as sources of livelihood, labor, and objects of fascination [2,3]. Wildlife tourism is one such arena in which animals are the silent majority. In these spaces, their lives are no longer their own; neoliberal capitalistic tourism markets collapse the interests of animals into imprecise categories or ignore them completely [4,5,6].

A niche of nature-based tourism, wildlife tourism revolves around encounters with non-domesticated nonhuman animals that are captive or free-ranging, usually in or near a protected area [7]. Estimated to represent 20–40% of tourism and 9% of the GDP globally, the market size of wildlife tourism is around 12 million trips per year, growing at a rate of 10% annually [8,9]. The captive wildlife tourism sector comprises about 2.6 million animals living in over 10,000 zoos and aquariums across 80 countries [10]. The nature of encounters at the tourist–animal interface is diverse within and across categories of attractions, ranging from consumptive (e.g., hunting and fishing) to non-consumptive (e.g., photographic safaris) encounters [11,12,13,14].

A desk audit by Moorhouse et al. reviewed the diversity of captive wildlife tourism attractions around the world to generate a typology that excluded hunting, fishing, national parks, protected areas, and zoos [15]. They collected data from TripAdvisor reviews and web-based sources to determine whether the welfare and conservation outcomes for focal species were impacted by the attraction. Amongst other findings, the study estimated that over half a million animals are likely involved in tourism attractions worldwide, which endanger their welfare or conservation [15]. Troublingly, these attractions receive an estimated 2.3–3.7 million tourists per annum [15]. Acknowledging TripAdvisor as the most popular online forum for tourists to share feedback on attractions, the authors conclude that tourist feedback is not a reliable source to regulate the use of animals in tourism [15]. Evidence from TripAdvisor reviews associated with the surveyed attractions demonstrates that only a minority of tourists (7.8%) identify and react to the welfare of animals at tourist attractions (ibid). Follow-up studies support this conclusion; without priming, tourists are ineffective at evaluating whether an attraction harms wildlife [15,16].

In the wake of mounting evidence around the unethical use of animals in wildlife tourism, it can be easy to overlook other preliminary encouraging findings. For example, six of the twenty-four types of attractions Moorhouse et al. surveyed had net positive conservation and welfare outcomes—five of which were sanctuary attractions (bear, dolphin, orangutan, and elephant sanctuaries) [15]. While other attractions focused on tourist revenue, sanctuary attractions were the only category with an explicit primary focus on the welfare of the animals involved since they rescued animals from the wild or aimed to improve their welfare and/or conservation status. Fortunately, additional research found that global wildlife tourists are likely to favor attractions with deliverable benefits to the welfare and conservation of the animals involved [16,17,18].

Wild animals are evidently and undeniably the most important feature of a growing global tourism industry. Yet, they remain underserved at intersections of different (and often opposing) disciplinary, commercial, and humanitarian interests. Meanwhile, processes of commodification sever socio-ecological relations and transform animal subjects into objects and laborers [5,19]. Consequently, wild animals become ‘lively commodities’, prioritized for their nonhuman charisma and encounter value while subjected to human use, with little opportunity to express agency, consent, or dissent [16,20,21,22,23].

In this paper, we attempt to ‘stay with the trouble’ [24] of wildlife tourism by conceptualizing ways to ‘bring animals into’ research and practice [25]. This phrase refers to addressing the ‘question of the animal,’ coined by the subfield of animal geography, which emerged as a result of the ‘animal turn’ precipitating over the last two decades across various social science and humanities disciplines [26]. To bring animals in, animal geographers suggest centering animal interests in public discourse and undertaking action to address socio-ecological dilemmas [25]. For our purposes, this pertains to imagining a kinder, more ethically robust, and care-full tourism industry for wild animals.

The objective of this paper is to highlight animal stakeholders, evidenced-based best practices, care ethics, and compassion as being central to sustainable wildlife tourism. These tenets stem from an animal geography lens that seeks to bring animals in as subjects-of-a-life, in alignment with posthuman and feminist epistemologies, which recognize how animals—as ecological agents—possess subjectivities [27]. This inclusive perspective suits the inquiry into the lifeworlds and standpoints of animals in wildlife tourism. Animal geographers acknowledge that care for individual animals can shape conservation outcomes [28] and ask questions about where transspecies caregiving takes place and whose care matters [29]. Despite limited engagement with wildlife tourism in animal geography until this point, it is well-positioned for studies of animal-based tourism and transspecies caregiving [6,19,30,31]. Beyond animal geography, we also integrate research from various multidisciplinary subfields concerned with animals for a holistic approach, including animal welfare, wildlife conservation, multispecies ethnography, animal ethics, and sustainability [32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39].

The conceptual framing of this paper could be described as multispecies, critical, and socio-ecological; it aims to ‘stay with the trouble’ of wildlife tourism through a theory synthesis, which argues that ‘bringing animals in’ is integral to support sustainability and justice [40,41,42]. We claim that wildlife tourism attractions cannot be considered sustainable if they fail to meaningfully incorporate the conservation-welfare nexus, evidence-based and care-full practice, and animal stakeholdership. This is grounded in increasing evidence from academic and journalistic investigations, which highlights the prevalence of unethical and unsustainable wildlife tourism on a global scale. Issues include nonhuman suffering and biodiversity loss, exploitative and unevidenced practices, gaps in the knowledge of wildlife welfare, and limited engagement with animals as stakeholders.

Our theory synthesis constellates scholarship related to these issues from numerous disciplinary perspectives to achieve conceptual integration, thus ‘bringing animals in’. These include animal welfare, wildlife conservation, animal geography, multispecies ethnography, animal ethics, and sustainability. Having observed how the lives, bodies, and labors of wild animals in tourism are under-accounted for, we address the lack of engagement in sustainability research through consideration of posthuman, feminist, and relational approaches to wildlife tourism in tandem with scientific and applied studies of wildlife welfare and zoos.

This paper is organized as follows. First, we delineate the importance of contending with the conservation-welfare nexus as it impacts wildlife and undermines sustainable development goals [32,37]. Second, we emphasize the need for evidence-based and care-full practice. We demonstrate how attempts to improve the lives of wild animals are limited by a lack of evidence-based research on wild animal welfare, best practices for captive management, and wildlife rehabilitation [43,44]. This is compounded by illiteracy amongst tourists and tourism operators around animal welfare [16,38,45,46]. Third, we make a case for animal stakeholdership, given the limited (to non-existent) stakeholdership afforded to most animals in the industry despite being co-participants and co-creators of the tourism experience. Finally, we consider the extent to which wildlife sanctuary tourism serves as a further problem or panacea that balances the conservation and welfare of wild animals [15,47,48]. We conclude this conceptual contribution with final thoughts and avenues for future research.

2. Conservation-Welfare Nexus

There is growing awareness of how tourism can exploit and endanger animal lives [16,49]. Increasing investigative reports from journalists [50], academics [5,49,51,52], NGOs, and conservation authorities have exposed the entwined mutualism of the wildlife trade and tourism industries. Tourism activities can impact the health [53], behavior [54,55], abundance [56], ecology, and habitat of the species involved [7]. The repeated disturbance or removal of individuals from a wild population for tourism purposes can trigger a change in their feeding and reproductive behavior, leading to stress and illness, thus reducing the fitness and reproductive success of the wild population [16,57]. This anthropogenic pressure creates a feedback loop that drives biodiversity loss and, in extreme cases, can trigger an extinction vortex [58].

As a direct or indirect result of tourism activities, wild animals become less responsive to human presence. This process of habituation can jeopardize the well-being of individuals and the socio-ecological integrity of the ecosystem [59]. Wild animals are habituated to the presence of tourists in order to facilitate close encounters, such as using the animals as photo props for wildlife selfies shared on sites such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and TripAdvisor [49,60]. Wildlife selfies in turn influence tourists’ perception of what constitutes appropriate and ethical interactions with wild animals and can create a desire for close encounters [57,61,62,63]. More research is needed to critically examine the habituation of wild animals in the context of sustainable tourism [64,65].

While ecocentric and animal ethics approaches share a non-anthropocentric belief in the intrinsic value of nature, they may differ in the prioritization of interests and stakeholdership, especially in conservation practice [49]. For example, an ecocentric approach in conservation seeks to preserve the integrity of ecosystems and biodiversity but may lead to the disenfranchisement of marginalized groups, including individual nonhuman animals and/or indigenous communities [66,67,68,69]. Ultimately, animal welfare and conservation are dynamic interacting factors that should be considered complementary approaches when attempting to improve the sustainability of wildlife tourism. This dual-pronged mandate aligns with multiple ethical frameworks, such as Conservation Welfare [34], duty of care [70], entangled empathy [71], compassionate conservation [42], and ecofeminism [13]. For wildlife tourism contexts, we recommend a Conservation Welfare approach for the subsequent reasons.

The result of a collaborative effort between animal welfare and conservation experts, Conservation Welfare is an emerging discipline and ethical framework that relies on scientific evidence to guide decision-making in the management of wild animals [34]. As a framework, it recognizes that the methods required by conservation work—both in situ (collaring, translocation, culling, establishing corridors, protected area management, etc.) and ex situ (e.g., captive breeding and zoo tourism)—can lead to reduced welfare states for animals. It seeks to simultaneously achieve effectual wildlife conservation projects with minimal suffering for the species involved and good animal welfare outcomes [34].

A Conservation Welfare approach is also well-suited to development contexts because it recognizes the numerous trade-offs, hard decisions, and complexities involved in all aspects of conservation. Parallel challenges face those working to improve the lives of animals in sustainable tourism and sanctuary contexts, especially where habitat loss and human conflict over wildlife intersect. Conservation Welfare may navigate these complexities because it permits some individual suffering if deemed necessary and justified. This locates a Conservation Welfare ethic within an intermediate ethical position (e.g., anthropocentric and utilitarian), recognizing animals as both instrumentally valuable to humans and as sentient beings with intrinsic value who ought to be treated compassionately [34,35].

Conservation Welfare shares much in common with compassionate approaches to conservation interventions as it seeks to minimize harm to individual wild animals and expects ‘scrutiny before action’ [35]. Admittedly, it is not as aspirational as a deontological approach (e.g., animal rights) or one grounded in virtue ethics, which share a first-do-no-harm principle [35,72]. Research suggests that, in practice, deontological and virtue-based compassionate conservation can lead to the same outcomes as traditional (i.e., consequentialist) approaches to conservation [35,73]. For example, conservationists are often faced with decisions regarding whether (and how) they should act in situations where animals will be harmed regardless of human intervention (e.g., invasive species v. native fauna, mortally injured animals, etc.). The more permissive—and admittedly imperfect—Conservation Welfare approach endorsed in this paper is consistent with applied wildlife conservation and welfare science and suits field-based research, which requires flexible and adaptive approaches [35,74]. Beausoleil advises that Conservation Welfare is transparent about

“which animals are to be considered (usually those defined as ‘animals’ in the relevant country’s legislation), what harm/suffering are and how they can be assessed, and how to fulfil our obligations to consider animal welfare as part of contextualized decision-making, i.e., by minimizing harms whenever possible”.

[34]

Research should continue to integrate the concept of animal welfare into wildlife conservation and management practices [75]. The animal welfare and conservation outcomes of wildlife tourism influence its sustainability, directly or indirectly, by disturbing the balance of natural processes (such as the destruction of wild habitats for tourism development) [17,76]. Moreover, the World Animal Protection’s report on wildlife tourism found that only a third of the sixty-two travel trade associations surveyed included sustainability programs on their website, while three had animal welfare guidelines, and only one monitored their implementation [77]. There also appears to be little cross-pollination between animal welfare science and tourism research, especially where it concerns the conservation-welfare nexus in non-zoo captive wildlife tourism attractions [37]. Evidence-based cross-disciplinary discourse is thus encouraged to negotiate what constitutes the ethical use of animals for wildlife conservation and tourism activities [34].

3. Evidence-Based and Care-Full Practice

Wildlife tourism is a phenomenon studied both from within and outside the tourism discipline [7,78], including animal welfare [79], conservation [80], sustainability [17,32], animal labor [81], and philosophical perspectives [82]. Tourism scholarship has also contemplated our relations to animals as tourists, keepers, and researchers [23,30,83,84]. Given the unreliable and mostly self-reported data surrounding the use of wild animals in conservation, trafficking, and tourism, it remains to be seen if we can adequately assess the scale of wildlife exploitation across these activities [39].

Providing good welfare to wild animals in human care is no easy task; there are still gaps in our knowledge of the welfare of wild animals [43,44]. Since the 1980s, research in companion and agricultural contexts has contributed the most to shaping the study of human–animal interactions [85]. When the welfare of captive wildlife is investigated, it is usually within the context of a zoo [34], and even less is known about the welfare of their free-living conspecifics. Scholars have also identified a ‘taxa bias’ in the literature on zoos, misrepresenting the populations of animals available for research and the number of zoos housing them [44].

Modern zoos and aquariums are visited by over 700 million tourists annually; yet, research suggests that most are not accountable to (nor influenced by) established best practices and guidelines [75,86]. There are around 800,000 animals, representing 8700 species, in human care in accredited zoos and aquariums around the world, of which half are non-profit [87]. These numbers also do not account for the hundreds of thousands of wild animals who live and work in spaces that are not accredited sites of conservation or tourism (or operate illegally) [15,88,89]. There are approximately 7000 to 10,000 public collections of wild animals around the world; this includes ~238 zoos accredited by the US-based Association of Zoos Aquariums (AZA), over 400 member institutions of the European Association of Zoo and Aquaria (EAZA), and over 200 sanctuaries accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries (GFAS) [90,91]. While the AZA and EAZA act as accrediting bodies with protocols, expectations, and inspections for affiliates, the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA) permits membership without rigorous accreditation [89,90,91,92].

There are around 1300 facilities around the world associated with the WAZA [92]. A first attempt to audit animal–visitor interactions at these facilities found that over three-quarters of facilities permitted at least one type of animal–visitor interaction (e.g., petting, hand feeding, riding, walking, or swimming with captive wild animals) [92]. The investigators caution that while some types of interactions may be enriching for the animals involved, others may endanger their welfare [92]. To address the issue of poor animal welfare in wildlife tourism, we need better operating models for animal–visitor interactions and increased guidance through independent assessments and monitoring of attractions to ensure accountability and establish guidelines and best practices [92].

Over the last decade, the literature on our duty of care to wild animals in the context of zoological institutions has evolved [70,75]. Once envisioned as a “Noah’s Ark,” zoos are increasingly shifting toward a new paradigm in which the “borderline” between in situ and ex situ conservation is increasingly “blurred” [93]. Recognizing the limits of captive breeding for reintroduction [86,94,95,96], zoos are espousing a more “integrated approach” by exchanging individual animals between wild (in situ) and captive (ex situ) populations of the same species [93]. As zoos transition to resemble national parks and wildlife reserves, ironically, national parks and reserves are bound to inherit “zoo dilemmas” [93]. For example, the demographic and genetic viability of wild species is increasingly threatened by shrinking population sizes and habitat loss [93].

In the absence of global regulatory bodies, the terms sustainable and eco are often conflated and misapplied to attractions, which endanger the welfare and conservation of the focal species, the local human community, and the surrounding environment [92,97]. Tourism can only benefit wildlife conservation if the focus is on ethical practices rather than profit, but tourists are frequently misled about an attraction’s environmental and ethical commitments due to greenwashing [16] and humane washing [98]. Psychological and cultural biases can conceal or reframe unethical attractions as acceptable [16,97,99], while the proximity of an embodied wild animal encounter [100] and its perceived authenticity [101] are factors that influence tourist experience and profitability. A literature review examining the phenomena of wildlife selfies (i.e., taking images or videos with wild animals as photo props) concluded that public perceptions of wildlife are seriously impacted by the internet, which can (even inadvertently) encourage wild animal abuse, the illegal wildlife trade, and unethical tourism encounters [61]. Furthermore, local cultural practices often conflict with global principles around acceptable animal use; this challenges the implementation of policy change, regulations, and accreditation schemes [22]. To address this issue, Fennell delineates seven hypernorms for animal-based tourism attractions to address the gap between global principles and local practices, including the pinnacle of practice; recognition of beneficence; non-maleficence; enhancing literacy and education; justice; recognizing agency and self-determination; and animal-informed consent [22].

Without global regulations, tourist revenue is the ‘ultimate arbiter’ of acceptable animal use in wildlife tourism attractions [16,102,103]. Some scholars suggest the development of a green market to direct consumer pressure in support of attractions with a commitment to ethical and sustainable practices while penalizing attractions with impoverished standards [16,22]. However, most tourists are demonstrably ill-equipped to assess tourism attractions’ welfare and conservation impacts on wild animals [16]. Fortunately, with priming on these issues, tourists are likely capable of discerning beneficial wildlife attractions from detrimental ones [102]. Thus, educating tourists about how an attraction undermines welfare and conservation has the potential to shift tourist attitudes toward disapproval and can lead to more responsible tourism [63]. It is critical, however, that information about the impact of attractions on animal welfare and conservation is readily accessible in the fora where tourist decision-making takes place (e.g., TripAdvisor) [102]. Increasing research looks to equip tourists with tools to assess animal welfare, conservation, and governance of attractions [17], as well as increase literacy around animal welfare and the recognition of animal-based indicators of consent, assent, or dissent [21,22].

One challenge to scholarly consensus about the effects of tourism on communities and wildlife conservation stems from a lack of long-term data and research methods that adequately account for biological and social factors [104,105]. There is a need to distinguish sustainability in clearer and more practical terms, especially since dialogue around it in animal welfare scholarship is infrequent [106]. Despite conflicting opinions about how sustainability should be defined and implemented, the provision of high animal welfare and net benefits to species conservation is integral to sustainable development and tourism practices [33,107]. As mentioned above, most welfare research to date has been conducted in captive contexts and with domesticated species. Researchers face a variety of difficulties when conducting research in captive environments; so, studies in these settings often have small sample sizes and may lack proper experimental controls [43]. We concur with others that there is significant value in “targeted, structured studies of individual operators or small groups of operations” to determine the conditions under which tourism is “most beneficial and least harmful” and how to “maximize benefits and minimize harms?” [17,104]. In seeking the answers to these questions, we may accomplish more to address the suffering and unsustainability of wildlife tourism writ large than theoretical debates over the broad harms or benefits to wildlife from tourism activities.

The dominant contractarian ethic underlying the tourism industry has largely failed to protect animals. A sustainable human–animal relationship in wildlife tourism would follow an ethic (or duty) of care that strengthens interspecies relationships by prioritizing the interests of animals in matters concerning them [32,37]. This is consistent with some ecofeminist and animal studies scholarship grounded in a posthuman and feminist approach [70,108,109,110,111,112], which suggests that scientific and intellectual domains should be combined with emotion, empathy, and affective states to address how we think about, and frame, wildlife tourism [23,71]. Ecofeminist ethics of care involve ‘respectful stewardship’, which attends to animals’ communicated interests (i.e., what animals are telling us) to incorporate them into care-full (i.e., grounded in ethics of care and interspecies justice) multispecies decision-making [108].

This echoes research into multispecies encounters and decolonizing works of care in orangutan rehabilitation centers in Borneo and Sumatra, where a “postcolonial economy” or volunteer tourism was observed [112,113]. Parreñas’ ethnographic fieldwork led to the development of custodial labor as a concept to describe the affective and care-full work of orangutan rehabilitation by both professionals and volunteer tourists [112,113]. Studying transspecies caregiving at this interface requires an understanding of the ‘mutual vulnerability’ of humans and animals involved in this care-full conservation work and how those vulnerabilities lead to “risks and consequences that are unequally experienced” [113]. A related and useful concept for wildlife tourism is Gruen’s theory of entangled empathy, which suggests that human–animal encounters are reciprocal and that we are mutually responsive to each other’s interests, needs, and vulnerabilities [71]. It cautions against arguments of ‘sameness’ as a way to fold animals into the realm of moral consideration. Human-like animals (e.g., primates) are not necessarily more deserving of moral consideration solely on the grounds that they are more human-like than other animals [71].

We should continue to challenge hegemonic frameworks for animal use in research and practice that enable their exploitation and limit the expression of their agency and interests. Those concerned with improving the lives and working realities of animals in wildlife tourism should follow ethical principles for non-invasive and respectful multispecies research [41,114] to develop evidence-based best practices, increased literacy around the conservation-welfare nexus, and guidelines for ethical encounters with wild animals through empirical investigations as researchers or as independent inspectors from accrediting bodies [33,74]. As long as we are using any animal for hedonistic purposes, including tourism, we have a duty of care to those with whom we engage. We must ask the following: what gives this animal pleasure? A sustainable human–animal relationship is one that asks and answers this question.

4. Animal Stakeholdership

In discussions of stakeholdership in the tourism sector, one wonders about the following questions: Where are the animals? How are their individual experiences accounted for in such deliberations? Remarking that tourism and conservation are human issues in which animals owe us nothing, Fennell criticizes frameworks that expect animals to pay their way in conservation activities as this presumes animals are stakeholders in this arena and included in processes of deliberation when, in actuality, they are pawns [115]. Animals are, in this sense, the invisible majority of tourism. The industry depends upon the generation of capital through the bodies, labor, and charisma of wild animals but massively fails to meaningfully incorporate their interests or safeguard their habitats and livelihoods [19,78,116].

Most wildlife tourism is operationalized in this way. Animals are positioned as resources (at worst), passive receivers of the tourist gaze (at best), and extrinsically valued based on their encounter value and/or ability to perform ecosystem services [13,117,118]. Even the subjective embodied encounter with wild individuals as tourists is a commodified experience. Such speciesist paradigms marginalize animal interests through processes of othering, flattening, and objectifying animals as lively commodities [78,82,119].

Organizations mandated to improve the sustainability and ethics of tourism have customarily not “held animals in any regard“ (e.g., UNWTO) and continue to conceptualize animals as resource components of broader categories of nature [99]. Even in the sustainability assessments, concern for the lives of animals and their circumstances is implied under larger conceptual groupings like biophysical matters or socio-ecological integrity [120,121,122]. A lack of specificity in the definitions of ‘alternative’ wildlife tourism has been noted by Fennell, who contends that of the 85 definitions available for ecotourism, only 4.7% mention wildlife-specific activities. Furthermore, 96.7% do not acknowledge that human–animal encounters may cause animals discomfort or pain [123]. While the World Bank’s definitions for ecotourism and sustainable wildlife tourism include “the environment” and “wildlife”, it does not mention animals specifically. Animals are also missing from The Cape Town Declaration on Responsible Tourism and the UN World Tourism Organization’s Global Code of Ethics for Tourism [9,99,124]. A systematic evaluation of the United Nations’ broad-scoping Sustainable Development Goals found little mention of the roles of domesticated and wild animals and no mention of animal welfare [125,126]. This juxtaposes with global welfare-inclusive initiatives like One Health. These well-intentioned but non-inclusive frameworks for sustainable development and wildlife tourism are impeded from meaningfully incorporating animal interests and agency by anthropocentric underpinnings [66,127].

When even ‘alternative’ attractions and guiding frameworks fail to meaningfully integrate animals as stakeholders, what can be expected from mainstream tourism? Following Meijer, “studying animal agency at sites which limit that agency will influence the outcomes of the study” [128]. Scholars continue to develop methods attuned to what animals may be telling us. There are ways to communicate with animals without a shared language, such as by observing their behavior, motivation, or choices [21,125,126,127,128,129]. There are promising developments to establish non-linguistic solidarity with animals, which involves observing body language and employing kinaesthetic empathy [49,129]. Future research on human–animal relations is encouraged to seek “creative ways to work around unknowing,” and to employ methodologies that lead to “some emergent knowing” of animals as co-producers of human–animal relations [130,131,132]. Establishing animals as political actors in matters that concern them provokes principled dilemmas about “what other animals want” and “how we can find out” [128].

How can we shift the fora for discussions around the use of animals in tourism from a human space to a beastly place, one attuned to animal agency [133]? There is a need for animal-sized spaces in government. Policymaking and regulations should enfranchise animals as stakeholders in matters concerning their welfare and species’ integrity [134]. The application of a justice framework to improve wildlife tourism practice offers a promising way forward. Such a model functions on a precautionary principle, and anti-discrimination approach to shift the burden of good animal care onto tourism developers instead of advocacy groups [47,74,135,136].

Defining justice as an outcome of equity, Kline et al. proposed the wildlife equity theory to contend with incorporating wildlife into multilateral sustainability planning, governance, and conservation work as “equal stakeholders with unique perspectives, interests and needs” [125]. Thomsen et al.’s multispecies livelihoods approach implies a moral responsibility to both nonhumans and the environment and suggests that tourism can be integral to improving the treatment of individual animals, addressing the ecological crisis, and nurturing wildlife–human coexistence [137]. Identifying the common ground between sustainability and feminist ethics of care, Bertella proposes a care-full approach to academic activism, which encourages a “holistic, innovative and practical perspective on care-based tourism research aiming at sustainability.” This complements the preliminary framework developed by Jamal and Camargo to guide tourism development, marketing, and policymaking based on a joint ethic of justice and care.

Animals should ‘have a voice’ in anything involving their interests. Developments in the widely accepted Five Domains model of animal welfare provide the appropriate mechanism to ‘hear this voice’ [138], and an embodied consent model by Blattner provides a way to ‘see’ their choice [139]. Fennell suggests incorporating animal-informed consent into wildlife tourism as it “situates the animal as the primary agent responsible for speaking on its own behalf, and it behooves other stakeholders (i.e., service providers, veterinarians (possibly), tourists, and local people) to be able to recognize these indicators, which demands a higher level of animal welfare literacy” [21]. Animal-informed consent follows a precautionary approach and aims for a realistic application to the current crisis of unethical tourism attractions featuring animals. As an intermediary position, it is thus consistent with a Conservation Welfare approach [21,35].

In sum, if sustainable wildlife tourism can meaningfully involve the interests and participation of historically marginalized stakeholders (e.g., local communities and animals), it could have the potential to benefit both human and nonhuman communities and strengthen interspecies empathy [71,140], collaboration [114,141], and care [84,142]. This entails redrawing a more inclusive boundary of moral consideration that has historically excluded multispecies communities from the polis.

5. Wildlife Sanctuary Tourism: Problem or Panacea?

Sanctuaries serving both domesticated and wild animals have received increasing attention from academics [19,143,144]. Recent scholarship recognizes animal rescue tourism as a distinct animal-based experience that appeals to those seeking ethical encounters with rescued animals [145]. We suggest that wildlife sanctuary tourism fulfills a similar niche for those seeking ethical encounters with captive wild animals in a conservation context.

Generally speaking, concerned citizens, tourists, the government, and emergency service personnel may draw a sanctuary’s attention to a wild animal whom they found injured, ill, in immediate danger, alone, or in illegal captivity (e.g., tourist interactions, illegal trade, and the ‘exotic pet’ industry) [19,39]. While a sanctuary refers to a facility that provides a lifetime of care to captive wild animals who are unable to thrive without human support, rescue and rehabilitation centers provide temporary care for animals who require immediate medical assistance until they are reintroduced to the wild [39]. Those who cannot be reintroduced are permanently relocated to wildlife sanctuaries. We consider tourism at any of these three facilities as wildlife sanctuary tourism and define a wildlife sanctuary attraction as a facility that allows visitors to view wild animals from captive-born or free-living origins who are undergoing rehabilitation and are unsuitable for reintroduction [146]. More research is needed to differentiate between ‘true’ wildlife sanctuaries and greenwashed captive wildlife attractions. Let us now consider the extent to which wildlife sanctuary tourism serves as a further problem or panacea that balances the conservation and welfare of wild animals [15,47,48].

Support for the promise of sanctuaries includes a first-of-its-kind content analysis of tourists’ shared photos on social media after visiting the non-zoo captive attractions and sanctuary attractions sampled by Moorhouse et al. (2015) [15,146]. The researchers used ‘netnographic’ qualitative methods to study the relationship between the images tourists post on social media after visiting non-zoo and sanctuary attractions related to the conservation and welfare outcomes for these attractions determined by Moorhouse et al. (ibid). They found post-visit photos from sanctuary tourists most often depicted the animal alone, while most tourists who visited non-zoo captive attractions posted ‘selfies’ with the animals. Content analysis revealed sanctuary tourists exhibited more ecocentric values and high involvement (i.e., knowledge of animals, environment, conservation, action-oriented, etc.), which corresponded to sanctuaries’ positive welfare and conservation outcomes [146]. Conversely, all non-zoo captive attractions had negative welfare and conservation outcomes, and tourists’ photos reflected unethical practices and anthropocentric perspectives [15,146]. Hence, it would seem that the provision of good animal welfare and conservation outcomes appears to influence human behaviors [146].

The wildlife welfare scholarship and GFAS are aligned in advocating for a ‘hands-off approach’ that limits close tourist–animal interactions in captive wildlife tourism [146]. The GFAS accredits sanctuaries that uphold best practices and humane care in a non-exploitative environment through ethically informed policies (e.g., restricting captive breeding and tourism encounters). GFAS-accredited sanctuaries do not generally allow the captive breeding or commercial trade of animals, unguided and disruptive tours that stress animals, and direct contact with the public, and they do not exhibit or move animals outside of their enclosure for non-medical reasons [90]. They also publish guidelines for sanctuary operators looking to improve the sustainability of sanctuaries through strategic planning. Sanctuaries may also participate in environmental education through tours and outreach to local communities; typically operating as NGOs, they generate most of their funding from tourism and paid volunteer programs. By contrast, greenwashed sanctuaries offer unethical encounters such as wildlife selfies and close interactions, which endanger their welfare or potential for reintroduction. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of greenwashed sanctuaries worldwide. Addressing the lacuna of research on this subject is complicated by a lack of consensus and regulations around wildlife rehabilitation. This perpetuates confusion amongst tourists and researchers seeking to support sanctuaries that demonstrably improve the lives and conservation of focal species and avoid those operating unethically.

No one form of tourism or ethical framework is suitable for every situation. In cultural contexts where a liberationist approach to wildlife tourism is unlikely to be adopted in practice due to economic, temporal, spatial, and social constraints [13], responsibly managed sanctuaries may provide a local solution for developing contexts, where less anthropocentric frameworks are not realistically achievable (ibid). Researchers have identified a ‘work-for-care cycle’ implicit in the operation of both Thai elephant camps (least ethical) and sanctuaries (more ethical), such that the encounter value of elephants generates income, which supports the animals’ care and conservation [13]. They recommend animal welfare and relational ecofeminism as ethical frameworks to address the Thai model of elephant sanctuaries while noting that the morality of work-for-care, even in sanctuaries, is flimsy and bears critique (ibid). This echoes the ‘custodial labor’ and ‘commercial volunteerism’ observed in Parreñas’ study of orangutan rehabilitation [13,112]. Thus, we suggest that as sites of transspecies care, wildlife advocacy, and tourism, sanctuary attractions suit research that embraces a hybrid and relational ethos and participatory multispecies methodologies [27,147,148].

Irresponsible and unethical wildlife tourism downloads the labor of rehabilitation and renaturing onto legitimate sanctuaries. Processes of severing from wild animals’ ecological, familial, and social communities transform animal subjects into commodities [19]. The conservation-oriented mandate of true sanctuaries endeavors to retie the severed connections that comprise the animal’s former ecological niche and umwelt (i.e., von Uexkull’s 1957 concept of an animal’s ‘lifeworld’ [149]). At their most promising, sanctuaries can restore the agency and subjectivity of their wild charges, undoing the objectification process and precipitating a paradigm shift toward more sustainable and just interspecies relationships [139,150,151]. Works of conservation, care, and compassion are a part of daily practices in animal rehabilitation and advocacy performed at truly ethical wildlife sanctuaries [34,70,76,111]. Sanctuaries may have the potential to shift paradigms of human-animal relations toward a ‘beastly place’ of animal sovereignty, entangled empathy, and mutual vulnerability, as opposed to an ‘animal space’ of human control [71,112,152]. Sanctuaries should encourage animals to “specific forms of agency to one another, creat[e] their own worlds, their own beastly places, without reference to us” [133].

Sanctuaries are multispecies landscapes; they can be more than internal displacement camps for wildlife. They can be places of hope, where colonial legacies are opposed through the reintroduction of wild animals to their natural ranges and through lifelong caregiving for individuals who cannot return to the wild, a ‘beastly place’ of entangled empathy and mutual vulnerabilities. It appears there is potential for sanctuaries to offer justice for animals through rehabilitation, environmental education, and advocacy. While limited empirical research exists in support of the latter, the growing scholarship is promising [6,15,19,47,48,128]. Toward this goal, we advise the development of a research agenda for sanctuary tourism and a typology of wildlife sanctuary attractions grounded in empirical findings.

6. Discussion and Conclusions

Despite their omnipresence and importance to the wildlife tourism industry, animals are generally not given sufficient consultation, consent, or stakeholdership in matters that concern their welfare, livelihoods, or the conservation of their ecological community [22,50]. Animals are exploited across multiple industries that profit from their labor, underscored by a systemic lack of care and compassion for their interests and experiences. In short, animals are left to suffer in plain view but on the margins of our consideration.

Whether wildlife tourism “can live up to its promise of sustainability” remains to be seen [33,153]. As a first step, we recommend staying with the trouble of wildlife tourism by grappling with—and bearing witness to—the unseen suffering of animals for its purposes [50]. In line with ecofeminist perspectives, this paper has advised taking a step back and “with new eyes, reconsider the underlying conceptual assumptions” of sustainable approaches to wildlife tourism [33]. Toward this goal, we foregrounded the emerging scholarship and integrative approaches to determine the acceptable treatment and use of animals for wildlife tourism [21,33].

First, we considered the scale of unethical wildlife tourism as it impacts the conservation-welfare nexus of the species involved. We recommended Conservation Welfare as a guiding ethic for mitigating hard choices and trade-offs in wildlife tourism contexts [34,35,36,37], followed by a discussion of the gaps in animal welfare research. Then, we discussed the need for evidence-based and care-full practices that focus on alleviating wild animal suffering in tourism through empirical research, in tandem with relational and compassion-based approaches [35,75,76,109,110]. Next, we considered the challenges of adequately addressing the confoundingly layered and frequently negative impacts of wildlife tourism on animals from within the sustainability paradigm. Finally, we made a case for animal stakeholdership [22,74,115] and demonstrated that some sanctuary tourism attractions may improve the lives of the species involved [15].

We propose, albeit with some hesitation, that sanctuary attractions must provide positive animal welfare and conservation outcomes for the species involved to count as sustainable captive wildlife tourism. Truly ethical sanctuaries, we posit, may stay with the trouble of wildlife tourism by ‘staying with’ the suffering of wild animals through decolonizing practices of transspecies caregiving [112,113]. More research is needed, however, to determine if (and how) some sanctuaries bring animals into wildlife tourism and conservation practice in a just and sustainable way. Future studies should continue to examine the extent to which other forms of captive wildlife tourism (if any) consistently and positively reinforce wild animal welfare, conservation, and sustainable transitions in practice [17,46].

In particular, drawing from posthuman and feminist scholarship for its engagement with animal lives, we have aimed to offer a targeted, yet holistic, theory synthesis at the intersection of wildlife welfare, conservation, and tourism. To this end, we incorporated research that forwards ethics of care [109,111], wildlife equity and justice [5,21,47,137], and compassion-based practices [35,70,76] to contribute to the underserved fields of wildlife welfare [154], rehabilitation [155,156], and sanctuary tourism [47,137]. The objective of this paper is to highlight animal stakeholders, evidenced-based best practices, care ethics, and compassion as being central to sustainable wildlife tourism. Underlying our theory synthesis, an animal geography lens revealed the importance of embracing interspecies justice and sustainability, investigating the intersections of crisis dynamics, and decolonizing ourselves and the scholarship [25].

Throughout this paper, we have attempted to stay with the trouble of a rapidly expanding and exploitative wildlife tourism industry; of hard choices, compassion fatigue, and conservation work; of learning to communicate across species to create a shared language amongst species; and of investigating how to “live and die well with each other in a thick present” [24]. Writing under the “moral weight of extinction” [112], we embrace Haraway’s concept of ‘staying with the trouble,’ which requires the following:

“Learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings”.

[24]

In pursuit of sustainability and interspecies justice, we recommend that captive wildlife tourism (following Collard) “counter a world of enclosure, of deadening and growing sameness, wildness is a means to more multiple, lively and open ends” [19]. Achieving sustainable and ethical encounters with wild animals requires reshaping the anthropocentric paradigms under which most tourism operates into one that meaningfully brings animals into wildlife tourism as agentive consenting stakeholders. To realize a more sustainable future for wild animals in tourism, it is necessary to investigate not only the kinds of relations we want with wild animals but also the kinds of relations they want with us.