The Wild and the humanized: Animals in thai tourism

A conceptual framework for the classification of the totality of settings of tourists' engagement with animals, based of the degree to which they are 'framed,' is proposed. Four types of settings are distinguished, ranging from those offering the experience of Otherness of wild animals, to those offering entertainment by humanized animals. This framework is applied to a study of settings of tourist-animal engagement in Thailand; each type of settings is exemplified by a detailed case study. The study shows that, though Thailand is represented as a country rich in wildlife, destruction of the animals' natural habitats in the process of development, and poaching in nominally protected settings, has reduced tourists' chances to engage with the Otherness of wild animals in 'fully-natural,' and even 'semi-natural,' settings, like national parks; contemporary mass tourists to Thailand engage primarily with captured wild animals in 'semi-contrived' settings, like zoos, and especially with tamed, trained or humanized ones in 'fully-contrived' settings, like establishments offering elephant shows.