Wildlife is wonderful and, by definition, wild! More than that, the world’s wildlife is a beautiful and enlightening part of our travel experiences. Coming face to face with extraordinary animals like elephants, tigers and dolphins for the first time is an invaluable experience. However, many travellers are unfamiliar with the issues our wildlife face as a result of travel and tourism.  

 With this in mind, we are committed to ensuring that all animal encounters on our travel experiences meet a set of globally recognized criteria.  Using the “Five Domains” as guidance, The Travel Corporation and its family of brands and have committed to assessing any and all wildlife experiences that are included on our itineraries.

1. Nutrition

Factors that involve the animal’s access to sufficient, balanced, varied and clean food and water. 

2. Enviroment

Factors that enable comfort through temperature, substrate, space, air, odour, noise and predictability. 

3. Health

Factors that enable good health through absence of disease, injury, impairment and good fitness level.

4. Behavior

Factors that provide varied, novel and engaging environmental challenges through sensory inputs, exploration, foraging, bonding, playing, retreating and others 

5. Mental or affective state

By presenting positive situations in the previous four functional domains, the mental state of the animal should benefit from predominantly positive states, such as pleasure, comfort or vitality, while reducing negative states such as fear, frustration, hunger, pain or boredom

What does this mean?

Our teams on the road have the enviable job of building travel experiences across the globe and take protecting wildlife seriously. To help them ensure they are selecting only those experiences that live the Five Domains, our TreadRight team has created a new set of publicly accessible Animal Welfare Policy.

But what about you?

We ask you to respect all wildlife. Whether you’re travelling with us or not, keep these tips in mind:  

Do

• Maintain a respectful distance from wild animals and create minimal noise
• Research the venues you want to visit to learn about their own animal welfare practices
• Take our Pledge and make travel matter for our planet, for people and for wildlife. 

 

Don't

• Touch, feed, chase, ride or harass wild animals
• Take a wildlife selfie if the animal is being held, hugged or restrained
• Operate drones near or above wildlife, creating a noise disturbance
• Post pictures of endangered animals or species at risk to social media platforms such as Instagram or Facebook while using the Geotag feature to reveal your location. Poachers are now using unsuspecting tourists to hunt their prey.  

And what else?

We need your help. We commit to you that we will continue to incorporate our Animal Welfare Policy, and continuously review all of our partners who provide animal experiences on our tours. But we ask you to let us know if you have an experience that you feel does not meet our Animal Welfare Policy. Email us at animalwelfare@treadright.org, recounting the experience with as much detail as you can remember. Our TreadRight team takes these concerns very seriously and will look into your concern as soon as possible.