Our partner BloodLions, on behalf of 28 nature conservation and animal welfare organizations – OIPA International included – emailed a collective statement to the company GoPro asking to stop posting on their social media footages and photos of people interacting with wildlife.
The letter (read here: Collective statement on footage of people interacting with wildlife on GoPro accounts) explains in details the detrimental impact of showcasing interactions with wildlife on social media. This tendency normalizes the activity and further stimulates the human desire to have close up interactions with wild animals, as it simultaneously glorifies the cruel and unsuitable breeding and keeping of wild animals in captivity for commercial purposes and as pets.
Such posts are not educative and also potentially damaging. At a time of a serious crisis for biodiversity, it is imperative that company such as GoPro, known worldwide, does cease promoting these kinds of interactions with wild animals, and instead adopt an approach that can ensure the ethical promotion of wildlife conservation, animal welfare and the natural world.
To educate people and bring awareness to wildlife conservation, interaction with wildlife is not the way forward. There are many other (more effective) ways to achieve the same goals without the unintended consequence of tempting the public to interact with captive wildlife. In fact, even if one states that wildlife are not pets, people only see the cool video of a person interacting with an iconic species and they want to emulate that same behaviour.
It is important not to send out confusing wildlife conservation messages, but rather opt for more ethical and animal-friendly methods.
