Special Track 9
Loved, unloved or overlooked: Animals in tourism

Special Track Convenors
Gudrun Helgadottir – USN School of Business, Norway
Georgette Leah Burns – Griffith University, Australia  [Note: Leah is on the Wildlife Tourism Australia committee]

 

Human – animal relations are complex, contradictory and fraught with ethical issues and emotional dilemmas. Human impact has led to less biodiversity directly through breeding, hunting and exterminating and indirectly on animal habitats through ecosystem erosion. Humans have extraordinary power and responsibility toward others in the community of species. How humans directly exert that power and assume responsibility varies greatly from species to species of other animals. Some animals have been revered as deities, others loved as companions, some serve as workers, some go unnoticed by humans, while others are reviled and persecuted as pests. This speciesism, based on human interests, is profoundly anthropocentric.

 

The emergence of animal agency and animal ethics as concepts to redress the injustices and abuses of animals by humans and ensuring animal welfare is shaping human – animal relations today. However, developing an epistemological foundation for this, calls for an interdisciplinary and intersectoral understanding of animals and humans. The tensions between ontologies of Othering and Anthropomorphism in discourses on human – animal relations complicate this epistemological project.

 

Animals are integral to most tourist experiences. Watching animals is reason for travel in wildlife tourism, they are collaborators or workers in for example equestrian tourism and dogsledding, and companion animals are co-creators when travelling with their humans. Animals are also a food resource and as such the foundation for culinary cultures worldwide, and as such fundamental in the tourist experience. The unloved animals such as mosquitos and bedbugs can also greatly impact the tourism experience. Lastly, much tourism development overlooks many species that share habitat with humans, such as how lighting in recreational areas and tourism attractions impacts insects, birds and fish.

 

We welcome empirical and conceptual contributions from various disciplines and practices critically analysing topics such as, but not limited to:
• Co-creation with animals in tourism
• Animal workers in tourism
• Speciesism in tourism
• Wildlife tourism
• Animal agency in tourism
• Anthropomorphism and tourism
• Biodiversity crisis in tourism
• Companion animals in tourism
• Animals as food for tourists