An animal protection charity is calling on tourists to turn down opportunities to take photos of themselves with wild animals, as a growing number of such images, including “tiger selfies”, surface online.
Coinciding with Global Tiger Day, Care for the Wild International, which is pushing their No Photos, Please! campaign into Thailand next month, wants to highlight the impact the photos have on wildlife.
The charity’s plea comes at a time when a particularly reckless craze has been catching the attention of the media — men taking photos with tigers to use on their profiles.
The charity’s campaigns and communications manager Chris Pitt said: “People want to copy the photos they’ve seen online, which leads to more animal suffering.” He added: “A lot of us when we’ve travelled have seen an opportunity to take a photo with a monkey on your shoulder. In Thailand it’s very popular to have a photo with a slow loris — people are encouraged to think they’re cute and good for a photo but these are nocturnal animals from the jungle being dragged around neon-lit resorts, with their teeth and claws clipped, having cameras flashed in their eyes.” As well as the risk to wildlife, tourists are also putting themselves at danger for the sake of a photo. Care for the Wild International estimates that at the Tiger Temple in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, a popular tourist destination for British people, Australians and New Zealanders, there are up to 60 incidents a year (of varying severity) of captive tigers mauling tourists or volunteers.
-© Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014
