Scroll through Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube and you’ll find it everywhere: tourists riding elephants, posing with tiger cubs, cradling sloths, or grinning next to orangutans forced into human-like roles. These images are sold as once-in-a-lifetime experiences. What they actually are is propaganda for an industry built on domination.
New research published in Conservation Biology makes it plain: the way free living animal tourism is shown on social media directly fuels demand for more of it. Researchers tested responses from more than 2,400 people across six countries, showing them images, videos, and text about six attractions, including orangutan boxing, elephant bathing, and sloth cuddling. The results were clear: the more positively people reacted emotionally, the more likely they said they’d want to go themselves. It didn’t matter whether they read a description, saw a picture, or watched a video. The content, seeing humans touch, hold, or control free living animals, was enough to normalise it.
The harm is hidden behind smiles and filters. An elephant in a river looks playful. A sloth draped around someone’s shoulders looks cute. A tiger cub looks cuddly. What’s absent in these images is the cruelty that makes these moments possible, animals stolen from their families, controlled through fear, kept in confinement, and treated as living props.
Culture and conditioning
The study also revealed stark cultural differences. People in the U.S. and Australia were far more likely to want to attend these attractions than people in northern Europe. That mirrors differences in animal protection laws, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and the UK all rank higher for protections than the U.S. or Australia. But it also reflects the social norms we absorb. Where exploitation is normalised, demand grows.
Age and social media use played another role. Younger people and heavy social media users were the most likely to want to join in. The logic is simple: the more you see, the more normal it becomes. Social media doesn’t just record culture, it manufactures it, making abuse look like leisure.
Not harmless entertainment
Free living animal tourism isn’t some fringe sideshow. Millions of tourists every year pay to be part of it. Behind the scenes, hundreds of thousands of animals live and die under its control. These aren’t “educational encounters” or “conservation programmes.” They are businesses that treat animals as property and spectacles. A chained elephant painting a picture is no different from a circus act. An orangutan forced to box is no different from a parody of slavery.
The researchers behind this study warn that social media is accelerating the problem, flattening empathy into emojis and likes. Videos of slow lorises showing signs of stress consistently receive more views than videos of them in natural conditions. The more distress an animal displays, the more attention it gets, a grotesque algorithmic incentive to keep exploiting them.
What needs to change
This isn’t just about misguided tourists. It’s about platforms profiting from exploitation and governments allowing industries to operate with impunity. The UK’s new Animals (Low-Welfare Activities Abroad) Act makes a start by restricting advertising for some of these practices. But laws only matter if they’re enforced, and if public pressure keeps rising.
Social media companies also bear responsibility. They already remove violent or misleading content when it suits them. They could do the same for footage that promotes animal exploitation. Instead, they often profit from it.
Our responsibility
Every “like,” every share, every influencer post with a tiger cub is an advertisement for more abuse. Just as trophy hunters once posed with dead lions to flaunt domination, tourists now pose with living animals to sell their status. Both are rooted in the same mindset: animals exist to be used, displayed, and consumed.
We have to reject this mindset outright. Free living animals are not here for our entertainment, selfies, or bucket lists. They are not attractions, they are individuals with lives of their own. The choice is simple: we either keep fuelling an industry of exploitation, or we dismantle it by refusing to participate, refusing to share, and calling it what it is, commodification dressed up as fun.