Animal Welfare Policy
Our Policy on Animal Welfare
Many visitors are drawn to Asia to see the continent’s diverse wildlife, and Selective Asia journeys often involve spending a day or two close to a National Park or protected area, or taking part in an experience at a wildlife conservation project or sanctuary. Our clients also regularly visit communities where local livelihoods are linked to animals in some way.
Animal welfare is of paramount importance to everyone at Selective Asia: our UK team, our local partners, and of course our guests. It’s a complex subject, with many factors that must be taken into account. Still, we are confident that respectful, responsible wildlife experiences can have a positive impact for the environment, travellers, and local communities alike, supporting the protection of habitats, ensuring ethical care, encouraging education, and funding future research and conservation efforts.
This can be an emotive subject, and rightly so. Our position on animal welfare is based on extensive research using a variety of sources, including relevant legislation, expert frameworks (such as the Five Domains Model), NGO guidance and industry best practice. However, we acknowledge that this is an area where Selective Asia are not the experts. We also rely on recommendations made by organisations such as Asian Captive Elephant Standards (ACES), World Animal Protection, and Wildlife SOS; as well as the expertise and insight of our partners throughout Asia. We regularly review the guidance offered by these and other expert organisations operating in the animal welfare and conservation sphere.
We hope, therefore, that the policy set out below will help you make an informed decision about which experiences to include in your own holiday. We feel that our approach is the best way to help ensure the welfare of animals, support local communities, promote awareness, and identify and report any experiences that fall below expectations.
Our approach in summary:
When controlled, operated and managed responsibly, wildlife tourism can play a key role in the preservation of endangered species and habitats.
Wildlife tourism can also provide a significant source of income for National Parks, projects and sanctuaries, ensuring that the work of caring for animals and preserving the environment is funded into the future.
We provide animal welfare guidance to all of our partners and suppliers, and ask them to follow it carefully.
We offer wildlife experiences only when we’re entirely satisfied that their procedures are effective and responsibly focused, where we are confident they benefit the animals involved, those who care for them directly, and the surrounding communities.
It is our belief that any visitor interactions with elephants or other wild animals should be minimised as far as possible, monitored carefully, and should not involve riding under any circumstances.
We work closely with local partners, and encourage feedback from our clients, to monitor and review what is offered; where necessary, we work with those partners to address any areas of concern.
In line with our policy on overtourism, we design itineraries that encourage travel to lesser-known National Parks or wildlife experiences, to reduce pressure on overcrowded areas.
Wildlife experiences: our stance on National Parks, conservation projects & sanctuaries
In an ideal world, all wildlife experiences would be just that – wild. However, many natural habitats have been reduced to the point where they can no longer completely support their wild populations. In such places, rehabilitation programmes, conservation projects and support for breeding animals help to ensure the ongoing safety and welfare of wildlife in these areas. Bringing in visitors to learn about these projects, and see the wildlife from a respectful distance, helps to generate the income needed to keep them going, and provides strong economic momentum to preserve and rehabilitate damaged habitats. This in turn plays a vital role in supporting local communities.
Unfortunately, not all wildlife experiences do have the animals’ best interests at heart, and some are causing harm by prioritising profit and visitor numbers over animal welfare. This is why we are committed to vetting all the experiences we include in our trips to ensure they maintain high standards that put the welfare of the animals and their habitat first.
The elephants in the room…
For many visitors to Asia, the opportunity to see an elephant - one of Asia’s best loved species - is a one-in-a-lifetime experience. There are many, many tourism ventures involving elephants throughout Asia, so identifying those we include in Selective Asia tours is a detailed job with a number of special considerations.
It is important to state that elephants are not, and have never been, domesticated animals. Historically, elephants have been used to transport goods and people in many places around the world, but this practice, and the associated training methods, have been shown to be psychologically and physically harmful to the animals. There are also human health and safety concerns to be taken into account, as getting too close to such powerful wild animals is obviously not without risk.
Whilst ideally all elephants would be living independently in their natural habitat, in most of the places where we work there are no national programmes to return previously captive elephants to the wild, and many of those currently in captivity are elderly females who would be unlikely to survive in the wild. As such, they rely on the care provided by the conservation projects to ensure their wellbeing.
FAQs
There are many passionate perspectives and opinions on animal welfare, and deciding whether to include a wildlife experience in your trip is a very personal decision. Should you want to include a wildlife experience, rest assured that we do everything we can to ensure that we only offer those providing the highest standards.
We choose wildlife experiences that have conservation and animal welfare at their heart, work harmoniously with the environment, and support the local community and economy. We regularly review our wildlife experiences, and ask our local partners to monitor these closely in the interim, taking into consideration the experiences of our staff on the ground, the feedback from our local partners, and any comments we receive from clients. In the past, this has led to changes to our programme, along with identifying experiences which fall below our expected standards, and who we therefore do not work with.
When selecting wild experiences - those that involve observing wild animals in their natural habitat - we check that providers operate responsibly (as detailed above), with the wellbeing of wildlife and protection of the natural habitat at the heart of everything they offer. Camps, lodges and sanctuaries are more complex, as there are extra criteria to be considered. In summary, we look for: responsible placement of camps and infrastructure so as not to be harmful to the wildlife or their habitat; a focus on education and conservation, rather than entertainment; and a commitment to working with local communities.
Our monitoring of wildlife experiences is on-going. If we’re not entirely confident that a wildlife experience adheres to our ethical standards, we simply won’t include it in our programme. If an experience we work with changes and falls below expectations in some way, we work with them to get things back on track where we can, and would cease working with them if we felt the experience was no longer appropriate. We would also report anything of concern that comes to our attention to the necessary authorities.
We removed all experiences that offer elephant rides some time ago, as we have seen evidence that these are fundamentally harmful to the elephants, and only benefit the tourist. We do offer several experiences where you can observe elephants, both in the wild and in sanctuary camps, where their welfare is put first and the focus is firmly on research, education and conservation.
We dedicate a lot of time to researching the elephant experiences we offer within our destinations, are in constant contact with our partners on the ground, and always take seriously the feedback we receive from our clients. Our selection criteria are comprehensive; put simply, their end result is that we offer experiences where animal welfare is the prime consideration, and the provider can tangibly demonstrate that the projects are truly animal-friendly. We work with a small selection of elephant organisations, all of which focus on education, welfare and conservation, and our local teams visit them on a regular basis.
Although the majority of Selective Asia trips do not include experiences that specifically involve working animals, such as horses or donkeys, their welfare is paramount wherever we interact. Working animals feature prominently in the daily lives of many of the communities we visit, and will occasionally form part of our travellers’ experiences. We acknowledge that standards of welfare should still apply according to the Five Domains framework for measuring animal welfare (as linked above), and that there are also specific welfare concerns relating to working animals, for example the comfort and suitability of any harness or other equipment used.
Selective Asia trips regularly visit communities where local peoples' livelihoods are linked to animals in some way, and the welfare of these animals is linked to the welfare of the people who depend on them. Given the right infrastructural and economic support, it’s local communities who are often best placed to protect both the animals and their habitats. We always consider the wider communities involved in any of the wildlife experiences that we arrange, and support community-based initiatives to improve the lives of both the animals and the local population.
Along with elephant rides, there are a number of other activities relating to animals that we believe are unacceptable, and as such, would never include. Examples of this would be shows or performances involving elephants, or any other wild animal, or experiences where travellers have contact with animals in the wild such as bears, monkeys or wild cats. We also strongly suggest that our guests do not take home any wildlife-related souvenirs or visit animal cafes.
Whilst we regularly monitor all of the experiences we offer, there is no doubt that standards can change swiftly. Feedback from our clients is vital in helping us ensure our guidelines are being followed at all times. If you feel that our animal welfare standards are not being upheld in any of the wildlife experiences we offer, please firstly inform your Selective Asia guide, and follow up with your consultant when appropriate. We’ll also ask you to provide us with any further details and feedback in the survey we send following your trip.
A few of our favourite wildlife experiences in Asia
Supporting the best wildlife sanctuaries, education programmes and conservation projects whilst visiting Asia is vital in ensuring these projects continue to thrive and protect endangered habitats and species. The following projects are a handful of our absolute favourites, and there are many others to discover throughout Asia - ask any of our specialists for more details.
The Elephant Valley Project in Mondulkiri, Cambodia
Visiting a conservation project in Wasgamuwa National Park, Sri Lanka
Walk on the wildlife side in Nepal