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© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/156853009X418091
Society and Animals 17 (2009) 167-184 brill.nl/soan
Making Wildlife Viewable:
Habituation and Attraction
John Knight
Queen’s University Belfast
Abstract
e activity of wildlife viewing rests on an underlying contradiction. Wild animals are generally
human-averse; they avoid humans and respond to human encounters by fl eeing and retreating
to cover. One would therefore expect human viewing of wild animals to be at best unpredictable,
intermittent, and fl eeting. Yet in recent decades, wildlife viewing has become a major recre-
ational activity for millions of people around the world and has emerged as a thriving commer-
cial industry. How can these two things—widespread wildlife intolerance of humans and
large-scale human observation of wildlife—be squared? e answer is that wild animals are only
viewed on this scale because they have been made viewable through human intervention. is
article examines two kinds of intervention—habituation and attraction—that change wildlife
behavior toward humans and render hitherto elusive animals susceptible to regular, proximate,
and protracted human viewing.
Keywords
attraction, habituation, provisioning, wildlife tourism
Introduction
Wildlife viewing or watching has become established as a popular leisure activ-
ity and an industry that is worth many millions of dollars. It ranges from
informal visits to nearby countryside to see local wildlife to organized visits to
remote, often overseas locations to see exotic wildlife. Wildlife viewing can be
defi ned as the recreational watching of wild animals in their natural habitat as
opposed to zoo captivity. e essential feature of wildlife viewing is that it
involves humans going to where the animals are, as opposed to the classical
city zoo, which involves the animals moving to (strictly speaking, being
brought to) where humans are. is is what gives wildlife viewing its specifi c
appeal. “ ere is nothing like the indelible thrill of meeting a wild animal on
its own terms in its own element” (Ackerman, 2003, p. 41).
Wildlife viewing involves a wide variety of animals, including birds, ceta-
ceans, primates, terrestrial herbivores, and terrestrial carnivores. Approaches
to wildlife viewing can vary widely. Some wildlife viewers accept as a matter of
course that fi nding animals is unpredictable and uncertain and value the expe-
rience even when they don’t manage to see the animal, while appreciating
actual sightings all the more for their rarity (Rolston, 1987; Orams, 2000;
Montag, Patterson, & Freimund, 2005). But for many wildlife viewers there
is an expectation of regular, high-quality sightings. As wildlife viewing has
become a major industry that employs large numbers of people, the emphasis
placed on animal sightings has increased, to the point where many commer-
cial operators market their tours with the promise of close-up views.
Often associated with ecotourism, wildlife viewing tends to be seen as a
low-impact activity that is consistent with wildlife conservation. Wildlife
viewing is frequently represented as a “nonconsumptive” use of wildlife, in
contrast to “consumptive” uses of wildlife such as hunting (Langenau, 1979;
Duff us and Dearden, 1990). Unlike hunting, with its lethal eff ect on animals,
nonconsumptive uses such as wildlife viewing can be defi ned as “a human
recreational engagement with wildlife wherein the focal animal is not purpose-
fully removed or permanently aff ected by the engagement” (Duff us and
Dearden, 1990, p. 215). Wildlife tourists watch the lives of wild animals,
whereas hunters take the lives of wild animals. A successfully hunted animal
is no longer available for future hunting, but an animal who has been seen
continues to be viewable by subsequent visitors. It is in this respect that wild-
life viewing is nonconsumptive or nondepletive. On the face of it, the two
activities—viewing and hunting—could not appear more diff erent.
Some authors, however, have criticized the dichotomy between wildlife
viewing as nonconsumptive and hunting as consumptive. One line of criti-
cism has been that hunting is not necessarily depletive of wildlife—that is,
that hunting is consistent with the conservation of animal populations, even
as it involves the taking of individual animal lives (Tremblay, 2001). Another
line of criticism is that wildlife viewing is also a form of consumption—that it
represents “ocular consumption” (Lemelin, 2006). Lemelin challenges the
term “nonconsumptive” on the grounds that it conceals the potentially con-
siderable impacts that wildlife viewing can have on the animals watched.
I will suggest that there is a fundamental similarity between hunting and
viewing as activities. Like hunters, viewers need to fi nd their animals. Wild
animals often range over large areas and across diffi cult terrain, and some
understanding of their ecology and behavior is likely to be necessary to locate
them. Viewing, like hunting, may well require a knowledge of the movements
of wild animals and an ability to track them by reading the landscape for signs
168 J. Knight / Society and Animals 17 (2009) 167-184
J. Knight / Society and Animals 17 (2009) 167-184 169
of recent presence. Even then, locating the animal is likely to be highly uncer-
tain, to the point where, at times, it approximates to fi nding the proverbial
“needle in a haystack.” Hunting, as predation, must contend with what has
been dubbed the “anywhere but here principle”: “For a predator to succeed,
the predator must manage to be in exactly the same place as the prey at exactly
the same time; for the prey to succeed, it need only be anywhere else” (Barrett,
2005, p. 219). is same asymmetry applies to wildlife viewing: other things
being equal, the odds are against viewers fi nding the wild animals they wish
to view.
Whale-watching, for example, is confronted with the problem of locating
and accessing the whales to begin with, which may be far from easy, given
the mobility of whales and the huge area of ocean through which they range
(Wilson and Wilson, 2006). Operators may well have to travel some distance
and for some time to reach the points on the whales’ migratory routes where
they can be viewed. As most whale-watching guidebooks point out, whales
are often unpredictable, and there can be no fi rm guarantee of a sighting
(Gilders, 1995; Gill and Burke, 2004; Kreitman and Schramm, 1995).
Unlocatable animals are invisible animals. If wild animals cannot be found,
they cannot be seen. But the logistical challenge facing the wildlife watcher
does not stop there. Even when the general whereabouts of wild animals can
be determined, there remains the problem of their probable aversion to
humans. Wild animals are normally wary of a human presence and reluctant
to expose themselves to human eyes. For this reason, even though animals may
be in the vicinity, they are still likely to be diffi cult to see, let alone to view
with any clarity or for any length of time. What might be called restricted
detectability is a characteristic of most wildlife.
e background to this restricted detectability of wild animals lies in their
antipredatory adaptations—physical and behavioral—which make them less
visible. e obvious morphological example is camoufl aging coloration, which
makes an animal less easy for a predator to detect (Caro, 2005). Common
behavioral responses to the threat of predation range from generalized vigi-
lance and avoidance to reactive concealment and fl ight (Miller, 2002; Caro,
2005; Gursky and Nekaris, 2007). A broad distinction can be drawn between
avoidance behaviors that “reduce the probability of encounters with preda-
tors” and “response behaviours that operate once a potential predator has been
detected and function to avoid attack” (Griffi n, Blumstein, & Evans, 2000,
p. 1320). e former strategy relies on early detection of the predator—“see-
ing it before it sees them” (Hart and Sussman, 2005, p. 181)—which allows
the animals to fl ee preemptively. e imperative of avoiding predation may
mean a preference for foraging, moving, and resting in places with good
170 J. Knight / Society and Animals 17 (2009) 167-184
concealment cover or being active at times when encounters with predators
are least likely (Elton, 1939).1
Antipredatory wildlife behavior is likely to be triggered by a human approach
or human presence. On account of our long history of hunting animals of all
kinds, we humans are widely viewed as predators. e zoo biologist Heinrich
Hediger is one of many commentators to have made this point:
Man often plays the part of the predatory animal, in fact there is hardly a species of
animal that has not been hunted by him, often for centuries or even thousands of
years. us it may be said that man, with his world-wide distribution and his long-
distance weapons represents the arch-enemy standing, so to speak, at the fl ash-point
of the escape reactions of animals. (Hediger, 1968, p. 40)
Human hunting in the past has left a legacy of human-aversive behavior in
wild animals in the present (Washburn and Lancaster, 1968). Avoidance and
fl ight therefore tend to be the default behaviors of wild animals toward
humans. So pronounced can this perception of “humans as predators” be that
even seemingly unobtrusive forms of human presence can trigger fear and
associated behaviors in wild animals (Caine, 1992). What this means is that,
while humans may draw a sharp distinction between viewing and hunting, for
the animals themselves such a distinction is likely to be lost and antipredatory
behavior provoked by any anticipated or actual human presence.
at said, the visual focus of humans on animals that is characteristic of
wildlife viewing is likely to make humans seem all the more predatory:
A simple cue that appears to trigger antipredator responses in other species is the pres-
ence of eyes and, more specifi cally, directed gaze or a contingently following gaze. . . .
[G]aze direction is an important cue to what the predator is attending to. (Barrett,
2005, p. 208)
A feature of human viewing of animals is the tendency to stare, an intensive
form of seeing that is especially likely to trigger alarm in the animal (Tudge,
1992). In general, the very act of viewing will tend to be experienced as poten-
tially threatening by the animal viewed and to lead to heightened wariness
toward, if not immediate escape from, the human viewer.
at human viewing has predatory associations for the animals viewed is
substantiated by the existence of a large and growing literature on the direct
disturbance eff ect of wildlife viewing on the animals watched (see, for exam-
ple, Edington and Edington, 1986, Ch. 3; Liddle, 1997; Green and Higgin-
bottom, 2000). e nearby presence of wildlife viewers and ecotourists can
provoke a heightened state of vigilance and nervousness in the animals
J. Knight / Society and Animals 17 (2009) 167-184 171
watched, and distract them from other kinds of behavior such as foraging,
resting, breeding, and conspecifi c social interaction (Mathieson and Wall,
1982; Roe, Leader-Williams, & Dalal-Clayton, 1997; Newsome, Dowling, &
Moore, 2005). Animals so disturbed incur a cost on account of being diverted
from these other kinds of behavior (Frid & Dill, 2002). Wildlife viewers may
be kindly disposed to the animals they want to watch, but this message has not
yet reached the animals themselves, for whom humans continue to be viewed
as potential predators. In this sense, wildlife viewing takes place under the
shadow of the hunt.
Heinrich Hediger has argued that the fl ight response of a wild animal is the
primary barrier to its usefulness for human beings:
If we look more closely, it becomes clear that the primary reason for usefulness as
domestic animals to man is not the horse’s pulling powers, nor the dog’s intelligence,
nor the cow’s milk capacity, nor the hen’s egg output, but is basically a very diff erent
domestic quality, namely, the disappearance of that tendency to escape, so fundamen-
tally important for their wild ancestors. . . . Escape tendency excludes usefulness.
(Hediger, 1968, p. 49)
Hediger’s point that escape behavior is inconsistent with animal usefulness can
be readily extended from mainstream forms of domestication to the recre-
ational observation of wild animals. Together with the problem of locating
them, the human-aversiveness of wild animals poses a major challenge for the
wildlife viewer. Even when the whereabouts of animals can be confi dently
determined, there remains the diffi culty of sighting animals that are disposed
to conceal themselves or fl ee instantly from encounters.
If wild animals typically avoid humans, the question arises as to how wild-
life viewing could ever occur in the fi rst place. After all, wildlife viewing gener-
ally refers not to distant, fl eeting glimpses of retreating animals, but to close-up,
protracted observation of animals who stand their ground. Typically, among
wildlife viewers, a premium tends to be placed on proximity. Important
benchmarks of intimacy include making eye contact with the animal (Servais,
2005), getting to within touching distance of the animal (Schänzel and McIn-
tosh, 2000), and actually making physical contact through touching and
stroking the animal (Gilders, 1995, Ch. 2), being touched by the animal
(Kertscher, 2000), or even holding and cuddling the animal (Russell, 1995).
Proximity is also important because it can make visible behaviors that are
diffi cult, if not impossible, to observe at a distance. In her study of whale-
watching trips in Hervey Bay, Queensland, Sue Muloin found that “seeing
many whales close to the boat displaying a variety of behaviours” was impor-
tant in determining tourist satisfaction levels (Muloin, 1998, p. 212). Lloyd
172 J. Knight / Society and Animals 17 (2009) 167-184
and Ajarova (2005) have made a similar point in relation to chimpanzee view-
ing in Africa, where, for example, the observation of tool-use is conditional on
being able to get close to the animal for an extended period of time.
For their part, guides or operators may well be inclined to provide tourists
with close-up views of wildlife in order to ensure satisfaction (Goodwin, Kent,
Parker, & Walpole, 1998; Litchfi eld, 2001; Reynolds and Braithwaite, 2001),
while the promise of proximity is central to the appeal of many wildlife view-
ing operations (Matt and Aumiller, 2002; Carwardine and Watterson, 2002;
Hoyt, 2003). As a result of this tendency in wildlife tourism, wild animals can
fi nd themselves surrounded by crowds of people. Amboseli National Park in
Kenya reportedly “allows as many as 30 vehicles to crowd around a single
group of cheetahs” (Roe et al., 1997, p. 44), while boat-crowding is known to
occur in whale-watching (Spong and Symonds, 2003) and dolphin-watching
(Bearzi, 2003). e commercial reality of much wildlife viewing means that a
good, close-up view is imperative. “You must be able to get close up. Distant
wildlife does not sell, the experts agree” (Newlands, 1997, p. 20).
But how—given the wild animals’ typical fl ight response to humans—can
such intimate observation happen? How can clear, close-up, and protracted
sightings of animals occur when, by their very presence, human observers tend
to repel the animals they want to see?
One logical answer, of course, is what might be called the “invisible man”
scenario: that we humans can watch wildlife as long we do so from a concealed
vantage point that prevents the animals from detecting our presence. e use
of concealed observatories or “blinds” is well-known to birdwatchers but is
also found in other kinds of wildlife viewing (Shomon, 1998; Ryan, Hughes,
& Chirgwin, 2000). In an essay in which he articulates a “new ethic for whale
watching,” Erich Hoyt argues that such one-way viewing represents the ideal
way to proceed: “[t]he best way to observe wild animals is to watch without
being noticed, to become invisible, like the birdwatcher in the blind” (Hoyt,
2003, p. 176). e undeniable logic of the blind is that invisible or undetect-
able humans would not trigger antihuman fl ight behavior and would there-
fore allow animals to be viewed behaving in a way unaff ected by the act of
observation.
But blinds are the exception, rather than the rule, in wildlife viewing for a
number of reasons. First, they are not always eff ective; their effi cacy relies
almost entirely on their being positioned in the right place to begin with—
based on a knowledge of wildlife whereabouts and movements. Where such
knowledge exists, blinds can be used successfully—for example, next to water-
holes (Sankhala, 1999). But even then, there remains the challenge of reaching
the blind without disturbing the animals in question, and this often means
J. Knight / Society and Animals 17 (2009) 167-184 173
that the watcher must be prepared for a long stay at the blind. Wildlife pho-
tographers may be ready to undertake prolonged vigils at observation blinds
(Weston, 2005), but ordinary wildlife tourists, with tighter schedules and
lower hardship thresholds, may not. For this reason, blinds are likely to be
inappropriate or ineff ective when it comes to the more popular forms of wild-
life tourism.
us, the question remains: in the absence of blinds, how is wildlife view-
ing possible, given the tendency of wildlife to fl ee from humans? I shall argue
that it occurs by means of human interventions that serve to make wildlife
watchable. ere appear to be three main ways in which wild animals can be
made available for human viewing: capture and confi nement; habituation;
and attraction. e main focus in what follows is on habituation and attrac-
tion and their role in facilitating in situ wildlife viewing, but let us fi rst exam-
ine briefl y the role that captivity can play in creating viewable wild animals.
Capture and Confi nement
e classic zoo consisted of animals who had been captured in the wild (in
some “exotic” place) and then confi ned in cages and enclosures where they
could be displayed to the home public. By capturing and confi ning wild ani-
mals, the zoo solves the problem of locating animals. e public knows that,
by visiting the zoo, they will fi nd a range of exotic animals on display at des-
ignated sites within the zoo grounds as laid out on the zoo map and indicated
on signposts. But, of course, the zoo does much more than this. As an institu-
tion for the display and confi nement of wild animals, the zoo also solves the
problem of detecting cover-loving or human-avoiding animals by inserting
them into sites where they can be clearly and protractedly viewed by the pub-
lic. Zoo spaces are designed with the aim of achieving the “maximum visibil-
ity” of the animals (Mullan and Marvin, 1999, p. 47). Animals who rely on
cover in the wild become fully exposed in the zoo. is makes the zoo doubly
unnatural for the animals within it: they are subject not only to forcible enclo-
sure, but to forcible exposure, too.
Zoo display clearly “works,” in the sense that it makes directly and proxi-
mately visible animals who would not otherwise be seen, but this achievement
comes at a price. e zoo displays animals by decontextualizing them, both
naturally (habitat) and socially (social groupings), the eff ect of which is to
curtail within the captive environment behaviors associated with life in the
wild. Although visitors to the zoo are generally able to see this or that animal
there, they are seldom able to observe the range of behaviors shown by those
174 J. Knight / Society and Animals 17 (2009) 167-184
animals in their natural habitat. Modern zoos have, of course, sought to
address this problem through enrichment initiatives (Shepherdson, Mellen, &
Hutchins, 1998), but even in the “enriched” zoo there is still likely to be a big
diff erence between the animal’s pattern of behavior in captivity and that in the
wild. In sum, the zoo answer to the problem of wild animal viewability is open
to the objection that, while it maximizes the physical visibility of the animals
it displays, it fails to make them behaviorally visible. In a sense, the best the zoo
can do is to off er a close-up view of behaviorally diminished animals. is is
the background to the demand for what might be called holistic viewing of
wild animals—that is, to see animals in context. is is precisely what wildlife
viewing is supposed to provide.
Habituation
How, then, does wildlife viewing work? How can wild animals predictably and
consistently be viewed in situ, given the diffi culties in locating and detecting
them? One answer is habituation. Habituation is “a waning of response to a
repeated, neutral stimuli,” in this case, human presence (Whittaker and
Knight, 1998, p. 313). It is the neutralization of a wild animal’s fl ight reaction
to humans. Habituation occurs where an initial disposition to escape from
humans wanes and is replaced by tolerance of a human presence. Habituation
is often seen as synonymous with taming and in fact has been described as a
“taming process” (Woodford, Butynksi, & Karesh, 2002, p. 153) and as mak-
ing wild animals “unnaturally tame to approach by humans” (Reynolds and
Braithwaite, 2001, p. 35).
e habituation of wildlife has been pioneered by zoologists, especially pri-
matologists. Fieldworker habituation involves the person “approaching the
same animals day after day, and remaining quietly near them until he is
accepted as an innocuous part of the surroundings” (Schaller, 1965, p. 626).
is is not at all easy and demands considerable patience. So wary are wild
animals of humans that it can take years to arrive at a situation where wild
primates can be observed at close quarters (Butynski, 2001; Tutin and Fernan-
dez, 1991).
rough habituation, primatologists have often been instrumental in mak-
ing possible primate tourism. In some cases, tourism has been an unintended
by-product of habituation originally undertaken for the purpose of primato-
logical research. is, of course, was the case with the mountain gorillas of
Rwanda, who were habituated by Dian Fossey for the purpose of primato-
logical research. Although Fossey herself was famously critical of gorilla tour-
J. Knight / Society and Animals 17 (2009) 167-184 175
ism (Fossey, 1983), her success at habituating gorillas was what made gorilla
tourism possible. But there are also examples of habituation expressly carried
out for the purpose of tourism, including gorilla groups in Uganda (Hanson,
2001) and chimpanzee groups in Uganda (Lloyd and Ajarova, 2005).
Habituation alone, however, is not enough to make gorilla tourism possi-
ble. In order to be watched, gorillas must fi rst be located. For gorilla tourism
to work commercially, there has to be a limit on the time spent searching for
gorillas and a reasonable prospect of fi nding them. Much eff ort is therefore
expended in tracking gorillas in the forest environment. e solution that has
been developed is to use trackers to follow or tail the gorilla troop to deter-
mine its whereabouts (Westwood, 2006; Cox, n.d.). It is not the tour party as
such that tracks gorillas, but rather a separate party of trackers. ere is a divi-
sion of labor between the guides (who deal with the tourists) and the trackers
(who deal with the gorillas) (Lepp, 2007).
is seems to have been a successful formula in terms of establishing a tour-
ist enterprise, yet it still leaves operators with limited control and a high level
of uncertainty. Trackers do not always know where gorillas are, and this can
lead to frustration among tourists who fail to see gorillas. Tour parties may
have to spend many hours looking for gorillas in the forest and on some days
come away without having seen a single gorilla. But because they expect to see
gorillas, tourists “may heap abuse upon the park guides and rangers if they do
not (personal observation)” (Litchfi eld, 2001, p. 117). But the diffi culty of
gorilla tourism is only compounded by the environmental invisibility of the
gorillas. Even when they have been located, habituated gorillas are still hard to
see clearly because of dense forest vegetation. In his memoir from the Bwindi
Impenetrable Forest in Uganda, or Hanson describes nearby gorillas in the
forest as “visible only as a group of indistinct shadows and leaf-tremors” (2001,
p. 163). e forest undergrowth may well impede the tourists’ view of the
animals and hinder tourist photography (Greer and Cipolletta, 2006). All too
aware of this problem, guides do what they can to alleviate it by removing or
cutting away extraneous vegetation to give tourists a clearer view (Cox, n.d.).2
Uncertainty is, in fact, a widespread feature of wildlife viewing because of
the diffi culty of locating nomadic or ranging animals within the time frame of
the tourist visit. Operators draw on a knowledge of wildlife behavior to pre-
dict the presence of animals in particular places, such as breeding sites, resting
sites, feeding grounds, and waterholes or along migratory routes (Duff us and
Dearden, 1990; Orams, 1996; Estes, 1999). But even where operators have
such knowledge, wildlife sightings can remain unpredictable, especially where
the environmental visibility of the animal in question is low in any case. It is
unsurprising, therefore, that wildlife-viewing operators tend to be receptive to
176 J. Knight / Society and Animals 17 (2009) 167-184
additional ways of reducing the uncertainty of locating animals, particularly if
they also hold out the prospect of increased visibility of the animals once
located. It is for this reason that many wildlife-viewing operations opt to
attract, rather than simply habituate, animals.
Attraction
Humans can make wild animals viewable by attracting them to particular
places where they can be seen. ere are many examples of organized human
intervention through the provision of food and water to fi x the whereabouts
of wild animals and enhance their viewability to tourists. In American national
parks, garbage dumps became de facto provisioning sites for bears, which
attracted large numbers of visitors, who watched the bears as they foraged
through the garbage (Schullery, 1980); in East African safari parks, carcasses
have been used by park staff to attract lions and leopards to particular viewing
spots (Edington & Edington, 1986); in Nepal and India, tigers are provi-
sioned with buff aloes in order to expedite tiger-watching for tourists (McDou-
gal, 1980); and on the Indonesian island of Komodo dead goats were used
until 1994 to attract large monitor lizards (or “dragons”) for tourists to view
and photograph (Walpole, 2001).
e use of food provisioning is not limited to terrestrial wildlife, but is
also used to expedite tourist viewing of aquatic wildlife such as manatees
(Shackley, 1992), sharks (Carwardine and Watterson, 2002), and stingrays
(Lewis and Newsome, 2003). e water hole is another important site in wild-
life tourism. In East Africa, tourist lodges have been built next to existing
water holes in order to expedite tourist viewing of wildlife (Donnelly, Whit-
taker, & Jonker, 2002; Shomon, 1998, Ch. 3), and in other cases an artifi cial
water supply is used (Edington and Edington, 1986; Goodwin et al., 1998;
Suzuki, 2007).
e regular feeding of wild animals can make them much more viewable
than they would otherwise be. Against the background of the unreliability of
sightings in the wild, luring wild animals through food handouts is “attractive
for tourists and tourism operators alike because it increases the likelihood of
actually sighting the animals” (Orams, 2002, p. 283). It works by enticing the
animals to a place—the feeding spot—where they can be clearly seen. is
means that the selection of the place where food handouts are dispensed, and
where animals come to feed on the handouts, assumes critical importance.
Animal acceptance of the human food handouts is not, in itself, enough; it
must occur in the right place. e aim of the handouts is not, after all, simply
to fi ll animal stomachs but to make the animals visible as they feed.
J. Knight / Society and Animals 17 (2009) 167-184 177
is kind of attraction strategy can bring people face-to-face with animals.
Because of the close proximity to wild animals that it aff ords, artifi cial feeding
can make possible a much greater sense of intimacy and contact. Proponents
hail supplemental feeding for its “potential to manipulate wildlife distribution
and behavior for close, benign, and extraordinary viewing experiences” (Gill,
2002, p. 222). Conversely, simple habituation, while it makes the animal
available for viewing, tends not to lead to the kind of close-up viewing achieved
through provisioning. If habituation helps to bring wildlife into view, provi-
sioning can give tourists a ringside seat.
Comparing Attraction with Habituation
ere is considerable overlap between provisioning and habituation. ey
share the aim of getting wild animals to accept the presence of humans. Like
habituation, provisioning off sets the human-aversive behavior of wildlife, but
it does this in a distinctive way—by using the leverage of food handouts. e
animals tolerate a human presence, as it were, in return for the feeding oppor-
tunity available to them. Provisioning uses the animals’ attraction to food
to off set or neutralize their aversion to humans. In this connection, we can
recall how commentators have characterized human food handouts to wildlife
as a form of bribery (Rowell, 1972; O’Leary and Fa, 1993; McGrew, 2004).
According to this description, provisioning is an interaction in which the
human side exploits the animal’s appetites or greed for material gain to make
it do something (tolerate humans) it would otherwise not do.
ere are also major diff erences between habituation and provisioning.
One main diff erence has to do with the timescale in which the process is com-
pleted. As we have seen, habituation is often a slow process that can take years,
whereas the use of food handouts can drastically speed up the process of famil-
iarization. By rapidly habituating wild primates and creating the conditions
for intimate observation of their behavior, provisioning can greatly increase
the effi ciency of fi eld research (McGrew, 2004). In his fi eld study of orang-
utans, Herman Rijksen makes the point that provisioning—even the limited
form he employed in Sumatra—was a means of “accelerated habituation,”
which saved him time (1978, p. 18).
Another diff erence has to do with the behavior of provisioned animals
toward humans. While habituated animals tolerate a human presence, provi-
sioned animals become positively attracted to humans, whom they associate
with food. e giving of food to wild animals may be represented positively
as an expression of kindness, intimacy, friendship, or trust across the species
barrier (Steinhart, 1980; Lott, 1988; Bulbeck, 2005). In Japan, the monkey
178 J. Knight / Society and Animals 17 (2009) 167-184
park was originally represented as a place where visitors could go and “play”
with monkeys by feeding them, and this food “exchange” was the centerpiece
of the tourist visit to the park (Knight, 2005). In this situation, visitors
cease to be simply viewers of the animals but become interactants with them
as well.
e animals’ relationship with the food-giver changes over time, however.
In the early stages, the animals may be passive recipients of the food handouts,
but eventually they tend to become active solicitors of food from humans,
including tourists in sites where they feed the animals directly. “Begging”
behavior toward tourists is reported for a wide range of animals including
“panhandling” bears in America (Tate, 1983), deer in American national parks
(Hockett, 2000), dolphins in Australia (Orams, 1995), iguanas on the Gala-
pagos Islands (Edington and Edington, 1986), vervet monkeys in Africa (Lee,
Brennan, Else, & Altmann, 1986), and macaques in Asia (Wheatley, 1999;
Knight, 2005). Longer term, provisioning of wild animals for tourism can also
lead to aggressive and violent behavior toward people (Tate, 1983; Lee et al.,
1986; Zhao and Deng, 1992).3
Another diff erence between habituation and provisioning is that the latter
localizes the animals. is occurs by means of dispensing the food handouts at
a designated site—the feeding station. Where food handouts are regularly
off ered, the animals tend to incorporate the site into a feeding routine, which
allows tourist operators to predict with a greater degree of certainty the where-
abouts of the animals at a given time and therefore to organize viewing on a
more reliable basis. As Matthew Walpole puts it in relation to monitor lizard
(“dragon”) tourism in Indonesia, provisioning became “the cornerstone of a
system that evolved to provide rapid access to dragons for quick-visiting tour-
ists on tight cruise schedules” (2001, p. 71). e tighter the time budget of the
tourists, the more appealing to tourist operators provisioning is likely to
become. In this way, provisioning can serve to minimize on-site search time by
inserting the animals into a space of display where they can be immediately
observed upon arrival. By eff ectively subtracting search time from the visit,
provisioning makes for a much more effi cient form of wildlife viewing.
Provisioning can be said to enhance the effi ciency of wildlife viewing in
another sense, too. In addition to localizing animals, provisioning off ers tour-
ist operators the advantage of foregrounding the animals in a place where they
can be clearly viewed. As we saw above, a basic problem besetting gorilla tour-
ism is that, even when they are located, gorillas remain obscured by forest
vegetation. A similar situation arises with Japanese monkeys, who have only
limited visibility in the forest environment. Provisioning overcomes this prob-
lem by luring the monkeys out of the forest to a clearing where they can be
J. Knight / Society and Animals 17 (2009) 167-184 179
viewed without the visual obstruction of vegetation (Knight, 2009). In other
words, strategically sited provisioning works by denying the animals the
opportunity to conceal themselves, thereby allowing people to observe ani-
mals in a cover-free environment. Making wildlife viewable means not just
locating them (i.e. within their range), but also revealing them in that location.
Conclusion
e point of departure for this article was the seeming contradiction at the
heart of the idea of wildlife viewing. Wild animals are not, as a rule, readily
viewable both because of the diffi culty of determining their whereabouts and
because of their widespread aversion to humans. I have argued that, in order
for wildlife viewing to exist on its present-day scale, wildlife has had to be
made viewable. is article has identifi ed two ways of doing this—the habitu-
ation and attraction strategies—and has described the diff erent degrees of
control over animal display that they achieve. Habituation can still struggle to
provide the level of certainty required by commercial wildlife viewing. Attraction,
in the form of food provisioning, would seem to be rather more eff ective at
ensuring that wild animals become predictably and reliably viewable to visitors.
Both strategies entail human intervention that necessarily changes the
“wild” quality of the behavior of the animals on view. More specifi cally, the
pattern of mobility changes in both cases, but to diff erent extents. e pattern
of movement of habituated animals is no longer informed by the imperative
of human avoidance, as it was in the past. Food-getting mobility is, in prin-
ciple, unaff ected, though habituation may well have subsequent eff ects on the
pattern of foraging, as the reduction of predator avoidance that comes with
the neutralization of human predator status potentially makes new feeding
grounds available. If, in this way, habituation may be associated with second-
ary changes to food-getting mobility, provisioning leads to primary changes in
the process of food acquisition. In the context of tourism, the strategy of food-
attraction tends to bring about a radical simplifi cation of the pattern of food-
getting mobility.
Finally, no discussion of habituation and attraction would be complete
without pointing out that they are each blunt instruments that have unin-
tended as well as intended consequences. In many cases, habituated or provi-
sioned animals are brought not just within viewing range, but also within
nuisance range. Although tourism or recreational observation is made possible,
unfortunately human-animal contact does not stop there and may spill over
beyond the viewing site to the wider locality, where the animals cause damage
180 J. Knight / Society and Animals 17 (2009) 167-184
and other problems. e animals might be attractions for tourists and wildlife
watchers, but for local residents and farmers they are simply pests. What began
as a human invitation to animals to come closer ends up as an animal intru-
sion into human space. e invitee becomes a trespasser.
at said, this sort of situation—of inadvertently human-assisted animal
encroachment—is not necessarily irreversible. Learned animal behavior lead-
ing to confrontation can, as it were, be unlearned. But to achieve this, what is
required is for humans to behave in such a way as to restore wildlife aversion
to humans (what we might call “reverse habituation”) and withdraw human
food handouts while regenerating erstwhile feeding grounds in order to restore
a (mobility-based) foraging way of life (“reverse provisioning”). In an age when
our visual appetite for wildlife has never been greater, there may be good rea-
sons for keeping this appetite in check and acting to make viewable wild ani-
mals unviewable again.
Notes
1. is does not mean that all wildlife everywhere disappears when humans are around. ere
is considerable species-specifi c behavioral variation, and some species are much less fl ighty and
human-wary than others. Some animals tolerate an unthreatening human presence at a safe
distance, and this may well be associated with an antipredator strategy of early detection that
favors clearing over cover (Miller, 2002; Caro, 2005). Some wild animals can therefore be seen
in the open, albeit at a distance. is said, the general point remains—that wildlife avoidance of,
or fl ight from, humans remains the norm.
2. is problem of concealment or low detectability of animals is reported in other contexts
of recreational wildlife viewing. See, for example, Treves and Brandon (2005), Peace (2005) and
Wilson and Wilson (2006).
3. Habituation can also lead to attraction. “In learning to ignore people, habituated wildlife
have greater opportunities to fi nd attraction stimuli in human environments” (Whittaker and
Knight, 1998, p. 314). When animals lose their wariness of people, the human domain becomes
accessible to them in a way it was not before, and the chances of their fi nding something appeal-
ing within it increases. At least the human-averse disposition had the eff ect of keeping them away
from the core human zone, thereby minimizing the chances of frictions with human society. But
habituated animals are no longer subject to such inhibitions; human space ceases to be ultra
vires. In this situation, animal-initiated—as opposed to human-initiated—attraction may arise.
When, for example, wild animals start feeding on human crops, they become a problem.
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