WILDLIFE TOURISM impacts, management and planning Edited by Karen Higginbottom Wildlife Tourism Impacts, Management and Planning Edited by Karen Higginbottom Wildlife Tourism Impacts, Management and Planning Edited by Karen Higginbottom This book is published at http://SustainableTourism.Publisher-Site.com a series imprint of the UniversityPress.com First published in Australia in 2004 by Common Ground Publishing Pty Ltd PO Box 463 Altona Vic 3018 ABN 66 074 822 629 in association with Cooperative Research Centre for Sustainable Tourism http://www.crctourism.com.au Copyright © CRC for Sustainable Tourism Pty Ltd 2004. All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission from the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Wildlife tourism : impacts, management and planning. Bibliography. ISBN 1 86335 545 6. (print) ISBN 1 86335 548 0. (PDF) 1. Ecotourism — Economic aspects. 2. Wildlife-related recreation. 3. Wildlife management. 4. Wildlife conservation. I. Higginbottom, Karen, 1961– . II. Cooperative Research Centre for Sustainable Tourism. 333.95416 Cover designed by Katherine Czerwinski. Typeset in Australia by Common Ground Publishing. Printed in Australia by dbooks on 80gsm Offset. Cover photography by Peter Valentine, Michelle Whitmore, and He Minre Staff Changqing Nature Reserve, China. FOREWORD Tourism is widely considered to be the world’s largest business enterprise, involving tens of millions of employees and hundreds of millions of customers. Recent estimates suggest that as many as 700 million international trips are taken each year, and domestic tourism may well be an order of magnitude larger than that. Quite simply, people really do like to travel. And while many travel to visit offspring, grandparents, in-laws, or friends, many others travel to visit exotic places where wildlife can stimulate them with new experiences, impressions, and emotions. Wildlife tourism is a specialised, yet supremely important, aspect of the tourism phenomenon. When thinking about why people like to see wildlife, it is perhaps helpful to take an historical perspective. After all, only one or two generations ago most of our parents and grandparents saw many wild animals virtually every day, and even more domesticated ones. Just 100 years ago, our planet had only about a quarter as many people as it has today, and large cities were few and far between. Wildlife was ubiquitous in the countryside, with flocks of birds so dense they darkened the sky, teeming herds of antelope migrating across the savannas, and schools of fish so thick that in some places the sea seemed solid with life. Today, the vision of bountiful nature is seen mostly on television, and electronics has become the standard medium for many people to ‘experience’ the world’s wildlife resources. This exposes people to images of the world’s biodiversity in ways that were impossible a generation ago, though at some cost of authenticity. In former times, people often were intimately familiar with their local species of wildlife, and aware only dimly (if at all) of the strange beasts that occupied other parts of the world. Today, people may seldom see a wild animal other than commensal species like pigeons and sparrows, yet may be intimately familiar with the lifestyles of koalas, great white sharks, tigers, giant pandas, flamingos, giant otters, migrating caribou, and on and on. Though essentially out of touch with nature in any physical sense, people may be more connected mentally than ever before to at least some aspects of wildlife. Tourism to places where animals live and can be seen behaving as they always have may offer an important opportunity for bringing virtual reality closer to the reality as our ancestors experienced it. Once a person has seen a species in the wild, watching more detailed representations on the television or at the cinema, even in cartoon form, takes on quite a different meaning. The challenges of wildlife tourism are even more important because half of the world’s population now lives in cities, and their relationship with the wild remains distant, even almost mythical. But wildlife tourism provides urban people a chance to get back in touch with their own wild nature, feeling an atavistic thrill when a cheetah streaks across the Serengeti Plain in hot pursuit of a fleeing wildebeest, or scuba diving among a school of barracuda in the coral reefs off the coast of Sulawesi, or casting for trout in a free-flowing mountain stream in the Rockies, or watching flocks of colourful parrots taking wing above the Amazon rainforest. While most urban dwellers may not be very interested in returning to a life without the modern conveniences of refrigeration, electricity, and virtually unlimited amounts of information, many of them are voting with their time and money for at least a temporary return to nature, and visiting the world’s last remaining wild areas to enjoy wildlife tourism. It is no coincidence that, as the world’s population has doubled over the past 40 years or so, the area of wildlife habitat given legal protection has almost tripled, and now amounts to nearly 12% of the land surface of our planet. Many, even most, of these protected areas are designed especially for appealing to tourists, both domestic and foreign. Indeed, a convincing argument can be made that wildlife tourism has been an essential stimulus for encouraging governments to take the measures necessary for conserving the world’s biodiversity. What is more, wildlife tourism is providing some significant economic opportunities for landowners who would like to retain wild animals on their land. Private nature reserves are providing useful complements to government-protected areas in many parts of the world. In many other cases, establishing protected areas for wildlife tourism is bringing fundamental changes to the surrounding lands, increasing the proportion of employment in the service and retail sectors while significantly reducing the exploitation of natural resources for consumptive uses. Such economic changes do not always come about entirely smoothly, but it has been clearly demonstrated in many parts of the world that recreation-related employment can be more than five times greater than employment in resource exploitation in the same territory, and gross economic benefits are often more than ten times greater. All of this has been a rather long-winded way of emphasising how important is the topic of wildlife tourism, both as a phenomenon in its own right, and as a means of demonstrating to governments that we the people want our wildlife heritage to continue to prosper. We value gorillas, pandas, rhinos and elephants both for their own right to exist and so that we, too, may some day hope to have the unforgettable experience of being charged by a bull elephant, or walking quietly among a group of resting gorillas, or bringing down a ring-necked pheasant flushed by a spaniel at point. This book provides an invaluable primary reference for anyone with a serious interest in wildlife tourism – whether from a conservation or tourism perspective. Bringing together research from a wide range of disciplines, it provides the first detailed compilation and synthesis of wildlife tourism issues. Building on the concept of Triple Bottom Line sustainability, it helps us to understand how we might better use this emerging industry to nourish a continuing intimate relationship between people and the rest of nature, even as some of us isolate ourselves in concrete jungles during the times we are not being wildlife tourists. Jeffrey A. McNeely, Chief Scientist IUCN-The World Conservation Union Rue Mauverney 28, 1196 Gland Switzerland Contents Foreword iii Boxes, Figures and Tables ix List of Contributors xiv PART 1 The Wildlife Tourism Industry Chapter 1 Wildlife Tourism: An Introduction 1 Karen Higginbottom What is wildlife tourism? 2 Classification of wildlife tourism 3 A framework for planning and managing wildlife tourism 5 Why is wildlife tourism important? 7 About this book 10 References 11 Chapter 2 Wildlife Watching 15 Peter Valentine and Alastair Birtles Introduction 15 Description and classification of wildlife watching 15 Importance of Wildlife Watching 17 Where is the wildlife? 19 What makes a great wildlife-watching tourism destination? 21 The top global birding prospects 21 Birdwatching choices – some additional social and demographic dimensions 24 The very best prospects for mammals 26 An expansion to other wildlife: from birding to butterfly watching 27 Sustainability Issues - Lessons from marine wildlife watching 28 The whale watching industry 28 Issues for environmental sustainability of wildlife-watching tourism 30 Prospects for the future of wildlife-watching tourism 31 The way forward 32 References 33 Chapter 3 Zoo Tourism 35 Andrew Tribe Introduction 35 The zoo industry 38 The market 41 The zoo in the community 43 Acknowledgements 53 References 53 Chapter 4 Hunting and Fishing Tourism 57 Johannes Bauer and Alexander Herr Introduction 57 Classification of consumptive wildlife tourism 60 Understanding recreational hunters’ and fishers’ motivations & perspectives 61 Economics and markets 62 Impacts of hunting and fishing on wildlife and habitats 66 Hunting impacts 67 Management of hunting and fishing tourism 68 Some key issues 71 The way forward 74 References 75 Part 2