Animals caught in tourist trap

How much responsibility should tourism industry take for animal welfare?  Asks Rachel McCaffery

Animals in tourism have been a controversial subject over the past year with welfare organisations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and The World Cetacean Alliance and Whale and Dolphin Conservation launching social media campaigns against several British tour operators. It’s a subject that polarises opinion and in a dynamic and at times heated session, the various perspectives and the steps being taken by the industry to tackle this thorny topic were shared.

Daniel Turner from Born Free kicked off presentations on the subject at World Travel Market by outlining the level of concern the British public show for animal welfare when travelling abroad and shared several depressing images from tourist of animals in badly run zoos around the world. Born Free worked closely with ABTA for several years to develop The Global Guidance on Animal Welfare and have been supporting its implementation.

Simon Pickup of ABTA then underlined how tourism and animal welfare are fundamentally interlinked and stated the industry’s commitment to improving standards. The principal tool in achieving this is the aforementioned Global Guidance and Simon talked through this detailed document and the rigorous processes that went into its development.  Voluntary for ABTA members, it launched in The European Parliament in 2013 and offers targeted guidelines for various animal interactions, which are being successfully implemented by some of the UK’s largest tour operators.

Travis Burke from Grupo Dolphin Discovery was next up to the podium. His company operate several captive dolphin attractions in Mexico, popular with tourists from Europe and the US. Travis was keen to emphasise the high standards in which the dolphins they house are kept in ocean pens four times larger than the minimum standards set by the Mexican government.  He also shared reasonable sounding birth, death and longevity rates. GrupoDolphin Discovery has a clear commitment to environmental education at their parks and also operate a social programme to support children in need. Travis stated his desire to increase the research undertaken and shared some graphs on ‘muscular concentration of enzymes’ explaining that this showed evidence that dolphins do not suffer stress from their interactions with tourists. He rounded off his presentation by making the point that although 3600 dolphins are kept in captivity around the world, 35-50,000 are caught in drive hunts and 650,000 are caught annually as by-catch from fishing.

The last member of the panel, Mirieme Hill from Virgin Holidays explained that because customers take their values with them when they travel, tour operators have to take responsibility for the treatment of animals in tourism, where they have influence over suppliers. She shared the findings of research that had been carried out which suggests that a whopping 52% of UK tourists (SPANA research) would be put off visiting a destination again if they saw animals being badly treated there.

Virgin have been working with ABTA to implement the Global Guidance and have also taken things further with Sir Richard Branson’s pledge not to do business with suppliers taking cetaceans from the wild. Although this does have various caveats around elements like rehabilitation and conservation, it should ultimately drive up standards and help reduce the number of animals taken for the aquaria trade from drive hunts. Mirieme rounded off by rationalising that the global challenges faced by the worlds oceans are far bigger than the issue of captive cetacea. 

 A discussion from the floor ensued with points made about the role of captive animal attractions in conservation, the ethics of having members of the public touch and hold animals and inevitably the debate over whether whales and dolphins should be kept in captivity at all. With a wide spectrum of opinions in the audience consensus was never going to be reached but getting stakeholders in the same room to discuss this subject – a first for the WTM Responsible tourism programme – made for an interesting session!

Rachel McCaffery

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