If you travel to Asia, you will most likely see cute animals, mostly baby animals, dressed in cute outfits and cute accessories and available for photos. No one denies that baby animals are so cute and adorable. Everyone would love to take photos with them and upload them to social media. Touching her fluffy little body is so hard to resist! But who knows that a single photo capture equals a miserable life for them? You want to know why? Let’s read more.

Most of the animals used as photo props are babies who are cute and photogenic. Where do babies come from? If they tell you that the animals are raised in the country, it is probably a lie. Even if it is true, separating young babies from mothers is distressing for both parties. Wildlife is prone to stress in captivity (except they have a spacious enclosure and get plenty of natural diet every day, which, in this case, is unlikely) and cannot easily breed in a stressful condition.

Most of the animals obtained for photographic props are taken from nature and the easiest way to catch a baby animal is to kill its mother. Once the animal grows, it is no longer so cute or so easy to handle. So what happens when they are adults? They probably kill adult animals, or give them to a small zoo, or leave them in dirty little cages with a minimal amount of food to barely keep them alive.

In order to entertain tourists without harming them, animals used as photographic props have gone through a horrible and abusive process to domesticate them. In addition to experiencing animal abuse, most of the time those animals have their weapons (read: body parts) taken away. All animals have their special weapons and defense mechanisms. Lorikeets have a poisonous bite. To avoid hurting tourists, teeth have to be removed, but removing a loris’ teeth takes a lot of effort and drug money. The easiest way to avoid being bitten is to cut your teeth, which exposes the root of the tooth to bacteria and leads to an abscess at the root of the tooth. Watch the painful loris tooth extraction process in this video.

For more aggressive animals, such as tigers, lions or bears, a sedative drug is usually used to behave, but it still does not prevent them from attacking tourists. Dangerous animals also have their claws removed so they don’t hurt the tourists, their gold mine. Imagine if a tourist gets hurt and spreads the news, he will no longer be able to earn money.

Elephants are physically mistreated with sharp metals to control them. Baby elephants are not given enough food, so they starve to death and beg tourists for food. Never buy food from their owners.

Enough about the life of the animal. Now let’s talk about your life. When handling animals, has it ever crossed your mind that wildlife can bring zoonotic disease and spread it to humans? You never know what bacteria, virus, parasite or fungus the animal carries. When you touch it, you get the microorganism, but you don’t wash your hands because you thought the animals were healthy. Congratulations, you can now infect anyone including yourself.

If you are a foreigner / western, it is no excuse for you to take photos with this exotic pet just because you do not have it at home. This kind of attitude is exactly what started the exploitation of wildlife in Asia.

Usually the locals are not that interested in the animals that they can see every day and they don’t want to pay a lot of money to do it. On the contrary, foreigners are willing to pay a large sum of money to obtain this so-called ‘once in a lifetime experience’. If you take a photo of yourself posing with an animal and upload it, you are encouraging more people to do the same. More and more people come to make this wildlife exploitation tourist trap. More and more animals will be captured from the wild and abused by the owners.

Now you know the truth. Think twice before taking photos with them and do not contribute money for them. Be a smart traveler.

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