What’s Wrong with Orangutan Kickboxing Shows? Scrutinizing Wildlife Tourism as a Form of Visual Consumption

Abstract

As urbanization and environmental destruction increase, opportunities for humans to engage with wild non-human animals in their natural habitats decrease. But the growing tourism sector offers ample opportunities to encounter wildlife in captivity. Using non-human animals in tourism contexts, however, is ethically challenging. While non-consumptive wildlife tourism does not result in animal death, it might still impair animal welfare or involve other kinds of wrongdoing to animals. We are concerned that such encounters can negatively influence how we perceive animals and how we understand the human-animal relationship. We argue that taking an approach to wildlife tourism that deliberately aims beyond an anthropocentric stance, encourages us to question the role of animals as entertainment objects and explore what a broader notion of wrongdoing can contribute to a refined definition of wildlife tourism. Our discussion makes use of two crucial dimensions of the positioning of animals put forward by Stewart and Cole (Food Cult Soc, 12:457–476, 2009): visibility/invisibility as well as objectification/subjectivity. We reveal and discuss links between the two dimensions and tackle ethical pitfalls. The example of an orangutan kickboxing show elucidates how the described concerns manifest in animal-tourist interactions.