Crocodile tourism: The emasculation of ferocity

Erik Cohen*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

Departing from Franklin's approach to the wild animal in tourism, and Cohen's typology of differentially framed settings, this article seeks to show that, as practices dealing with crocodiles moved from extermination in natural settings to interaction with tourists in different settings, the crocodile was emasculated and its perception was transformed from a dangerous, ferocious animal, to a pliable, pet-like one. The progressive exacerbation of that process is examined in a comparative study of crocodile tourism in three regions of the globe, in which different species of crocodilians constitute a significant tourist attraction: northern Australia, Florida in the US, and central Thailand. The article calls attention to the one-sidedness of current studies of tourist-crocodile encounters, which prioritize the tourists' experiences but disregard those of the crocodiles, and introduces some novel paradigmatic approaches to tourist-animal encounters, which could help to overcome this limitation.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)83-102
Number of pages20
JournalTourism, Culture and Communication
Volume19
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Cognizant, LLC.

Keywords

  • Central Thailand
  • Crocodile farms
  • Crocodile wrestling
  • Crocodiles
  • Florida
  • Human-animal relations
  • Northern Australia
  • Tourist-crocodile interaction

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