The report describes venues where visitors can stroke, kiss, and cuddle with big cats, shows where humans 'surf' on the backs of dolphins, and elephants paint pictures with their trunks.
RACHEL FOBAR: ‘In a new report, an animal welfare group has flagged hundreds of zoos affiliated with the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA) for mistreating animals, including making big cats perform in gladiator-style shows, elephants play basketball, and diapered chimpanzees ride scooters. WAZA, founded in 1935, is a global organization of zoos and aquariums that promotes conservation and animal welfare. Unlike the U.S.-based Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), which requires its members to undergo an accreditation process, WAZA is a member organization that doesn’t require accreditation…
The report’s researchers identified a dozen venues of particular concern, which they visited alongside researchers from the animal advocacy organization Change For Animals Foundation…According to the report, by World Animal Protection (WAP), an international nonprofit organization that promotes welfare and humane treatment, 75 percent of WAZA’s 1,241 members—including those defined by WAP as “indirect” members (zoos or aquariums that belong to WAZA-member associations) — offer at least one animal – visitor interaction…
World Animal Protection’s report describes venues that offered encounters where visitors can stroke, kiss, and cuddle with big cats, shows where humans “surf” on the backs of dolphins, and performances in which elephants paint pictures with their trunks… About a third offered walking or swimming through an enclosure, 30 percent had performances involving wildlife, and 23 percent had hand-feeding experiences, in which tourists can provide food and water for captive wild animals, which brings them into direct—potentially dangerous—contact with them.
These experiences are inherently stressful for animals, says Nancy Blaney, director of government affairs for the Animal Welfare Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. “Some facilities just kind of bill this as wildlife tourism, and it’s really nothing of the sort,” she says. “Wildlife tourism is the kind of thing where you go and you see wildlife in their own environs, in their own milieu—not where you go and you get to take your picture with the tiger, or you get to interact with a monkey that’s dressed up in street clothes, or kissing an orangutan, or something like that. That is not wildlife tourism; that’s exploitation”.’ SOURCE…
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