Protecting Wildlife in Tourism: Progress Made but New Threats Ahead

As I reflect on this transformative year for Scott Dunn's approach to wildlife tourism, I'm filled with both pride in our progress and niggling concern about emerging threats posed by AI imagery.

A Year of Meaningful Change

This summer we launched our new comprehensive animal welfare policy, aligned with ABTA guidelines and developed through months of consultation with experts, partners and our employees. The response from our community has been overwhelmingly supportive; a testament to how ready our industry is for this shift.

But policy documents are often just paper without action. The real work has been in the difficult decisions we've made throughout the year. We've had to step back from partnerships that couldn't meet our new standards, even when it meant disappointing guests or losing revenue. We've restructured experiences to prioritise observation over interaction, ensuring that any remaining captive animal encounters are handled exclusively by trained experts.

These weren't easy choices, but they were necessary ones. Every decision was guided by one fundamental question: What serves the animal's welfare best?

In 2026, I'm excited to be expanding our focus on conservation and educational wildlife tourism. Our new programs will be expert-led, observation-only experiences that keep wildlife wild while providing every generation with profound learning opportunities. This promises richer, more meaningful encounters that create lasting conservation ambassadors with first-hand insights into a whole host of fauna and flora.

A Disturbing New Threat: AI's False Wildlife Paradise

However, just as we're making genuine progress, a new and deeply troubling trend threatens to undo years of welfare advocacy. I'm talking about the explosion of AI-generated images showing people cuddling baby lions, surrounded by tiny reindeer, taking a bath with baby otters or posing with infant primates. These images are becoming increasingly sophisticated and, at first glance, they are very convincing.

This isn't just a technical curiosity; it's a welfare disaster waiting to happen, not to mention a huge safety concern.

When people see these fabricated images of intimate wildlife encounters, they create demand for the real thing. That demand fuels some of the most exploitative operations in tourism; facilities that prioritise human ego and social media moments over animal wellbeing. And it may also create false expectation of proximity for guests with animals in the wild, misleading them into thinking it’s safe to push the boundaries.

The Animal Cafe Crisis

We're already seeing the devastating consequences of the proximity mentality across Asia, where the boom in animal cafes exemplifies everything wrong with ego-driven wildlife tourism. Research consistently shows that animals in these facilities experience chronic stress, evidenced by elevated cortisol levels, repetitive behaviours, and compromised immune systems.

Owls forced to remain active during daylight hours when they should be sleeping. Big cats beaten as babies and passed between strangers for photos while their stress hormones spike. Primates torn from their mothers as infants to be "socialised" for human handling. And when the babies grow up, they’re confined to a lifetime of captivity or used in canned hunting, medicine or for pelts. The welfare implications are horrific, yet these businesses thrive because they feed human desire to get close, to touch, to possess a moment with something wild.

The economic reality makes this even more complex. Many of these exploitative facilities provide income in vulnerable communities, making it challenging to dismantle harmful practices without then causing human hardship. But that doesn't excuse promoting demand for experiences that cause suffering.

Our Responsibility

As travel professionals, we have a responsibility to counter this narrative by championing authentic wildlife experiences over fabricated fantasies. We must celebrate the incredible wildlife photographers worldwide who capture genuine moments without disturbing their subjects, proving that real encounters are far more powerful than any AI-generated interaction.

Our commitment to observation-only wildlife encounters must extend beyond the charismatic megafauna that dominate social media feeds. True conservation tourism celebrates entire ecosystems, from pollinators and decomposers to the intricate web of species that make an apex-predator's existence possible.

Most critically, we must not be swayed by popular opinion or mass market demands when they conflict with animal welfare. The voices calling for closer contact and "better" photo opportunities often drown out animals’ true needs. Our responsibility is to consistently ask: What is truly best for the animal? Not what sells best or generates social media engagement, but what serves the animal's physical and psychological wellbeing.

Moving Forward

The improvements we've made this year at Scott Dunn are just the beginning. Our new welfare standards, our shift toward conservation-focused experiences, and our commitment to keeping wildlife wild strive for a tourism model that can coexist respectfully with the natural world.

But we can't do this alone. We need travellers to reject the fantasy of AI-generated wildlife encounters and embrace the beauty of ethical observation. We need the industry to stand firm against operations that prioritise human desires over animal welfare. And we need to continue having these uncomfortable but necessary conversations about what responsible wildlife tourism truly means.

The choice is ours; we can feed the demand for exploitative encounters driven by social media aesthetics, or we can champion experiences that honour the intrinsic value of wildlife and protect their natural habitats.