If you travel to Asia, you will most likely see cute animals, mostly baby animals, dressed up in cute outfits and cute accessories and available for photos. No one denies that baby animals are so cute and adorable. Everyone would love to take photos with them and upload them to social media. Touching her fluffy little body is so hard to resist! But who knows that a single photo capture equals a miserable life for them? You want to know why? Let’s read more.
Most of the animals used as photo props are babies which are cute and photogenic. Where do babies come from? If they tell you that the animals are raised in the country, it is probably a lie. Even if it were true, separating young babies from mothers is harrowing for both parties. Wildlife are prone to stress in captivity (except they have a spacious enclosure and receive a lot of natural diet every day, which in this case is unlikely) and cannot easily breed in a stressful condition.
Most of the animals obtained for photo props are taken from nature and the easiest way to trap a baby animal is to kill its mother. Once the animal grows up, it is no longer as cute or easy to handle. So what happens when they are adults? They probably kill the adult animals, or give them to a small zoo, or leave them in dirty little cages with a minimal amount of food to barely keep them alive.
In order to entertain tourists without harming them, animals used as photo props have gone through a horrible and abusive process to domesticate them. In addition to experiencing animal abuse, most of the time those animals have their weapons (read: body parts) taken away. All animals have their special weapons and defense mechanisms. Lorises have a poisonous bite. To avoid hurting tourists, their teeth have to be removed, but removing the teeth of a loris requires a lot of effort and money for drugs. The easiest way to prevent them from biting you is to cut their teeth, which exposes the root of the tooth to bacteria and leads to a tooth root abscess. Watch the painful loris tooth extraction process in this video.
For more aggressive animals, such as tigers, lions, or bears, a sedative medication is usually used to behave, but it still doesn’t stop them from attacking tourists. Dangerous animals also have their claws removed so they don’t hurt tourists, their gold mine. Imagine if a tourist gets hurt and spreads the news, you will no longer be able to make money.
The elephants are physically abused with sharp metals to control them. Baby elephants are not given enough food so they starve and beg tourists for food. Never buy food from its owners.
Enough about the life of the animal. Now let’s talk about your life. When you handle animals, has it ever crossed your mind that wildlife can bring zoonotic disease and spread it to humans? You never know what bacteria, virus, parasite or fungus the animal is carrying. When you touch it, you get the microorganism, but you don’t wash your hands because you thought the animals were healthy. Congratulations, now you can infect anyone including yourself.
If you are a foreigner/westerner, this is no excuse for you to take photos with this exotic pet just because you don’t have it at home. This kind of attitude is exactly what started the exploitation of wildlife in Asia.
Usually, the locals are not that interested in the animals that they get to see every day and don’t want to pay a lot of money to do so. On the contrary, foreigners are willing to pay a large sum of money to get this so-called ‘once-in-a-lifetime experience’. If you take a photo of yourself posing with an animal and upload it, you are encouraging more people to do the same. More and more people come to do this wildlife exploitation tourist trap. More and more animals will be caught in the wild and mistreated by their owners.
Now you know the truth. Think twice before taking photos with them and don’t contribute money for them. Be a smart traveler.