Multispecies livelihoods: a posthumanist approach to wildlife ecotourism that promotes animal ethics

Research on animal ethics in tourism has gained traction but posthumanist approaches to wildlife (eco)tourism remain sparse. There has never been a more urgent need to redress this paucity in theory and practice. More than 60% of the world’s wildlife has died-off in the last 50 years, 100 million-plus nonhuman animals are used for entertainment in wildlife tourist attractions (WTAs), more than one billion “wildlife” live in captivity, and some scholars argue that earth has entered its sixth mass extinction event known as the Anthropocene. This paper presents a posthumanist multispecies livelihoods framework (MLF) based on an applied ethnographic study of 47 wildlife ecotourism (WE) operators and wildlife researchers in protected area WTAs across four countries. Like any framework, it is a snapshot of the authors’ thinking at a particular time and must be improved upon. The MLF does not purport to solve the negative treatment of nonhumans that can occur in tourism settings, but rather responds to calls in the tourism literature to acknowledge our effects on other species and advocates for equitable human-nonhuman livelihoods. This paper argues that we have a moral responsibility to nonhumans and the environment, and the authors hope to generate reflexive discourse concerning the role tourism can play in redressing the ecological crisis and improving the treatment of individual nonhumans to foster wildlife-human coexistence.