Trip Advisor boycotts vacation resorts using animals for rides and entertainment.

Trip Advisor, the famed online travel portal joins the animal love band wagon along with City Discovery when it recently stopped rating or doing any kind of business with the vacation properties that encourage or use animals for entertainment of their visitors. We too feel that animals are not our private property and we have no right to use them for any sort of entertainment whatsoever. Animals should be left free to explore and thrive in their natural habitats, where they can nurture their families and numbers.

Good News has poured in the form of Trip Advisor’s (an online travel company) decision to not sell tickets of sightseeing experiences that involve physical contact with wild animals in captivity or close contact with endangered species including elephant rides.

Travel website City Discovery (that has a global presence) led the way to end the horrors of cruelty to wildlife caused due to tourism and therefore deserves special mention. The company pledged some months ago that it will not sell tickets to venues and activities that include wild animal abuse. City Discovery’s CEO Emmanuel Issaurat urged the online travel and tour sector to show collective leadership on the issue. The company that started in the year 2003 offers close to 8000 tours and activities in more than 700 locations across continents and boasts of over 1 million annual customers; their pledge can do wonders for animals in a big way impacting many more to join the resolution.

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Circuses, zoos and congested cages are incongruous spaces that echo loneliness, frustration or perhaps even hurt, beating, whipping and all things gory. The exhausting & acrimonious journey in trucks from one city to another as part of the circus crew reduces the animal’s existence to freight being loaded and then off-loaded. These sentient beings can’t wrap their heads around weird and painful tricks they are forced to perform in circuses or other spots in the name of entertainment for humans. They neither enjoy nor understand its purpose for which they are abused by trainers who often use electric prods, whips and strategies like food-deprivation to train them. Be it the roadside act of dancing bears or monkeys; always remember what the poor creature went through to put up that senseless performance before you even vaguely think of patronizing it. It’s time to take a collective stand! Zoos are no better in terms of treatment meted out to animals. Mostly these entities are seen putting profit ahead; the animal welfare takes a backseat.

Investigators from Peta visited our very own Indian Zoos to uncover their appalling reality. Each of them featured a lack of food, drinking water, medical care and veterinary facility, improper housing, inadequate security for the animals and no ways to stimulate their brains through physical and social surroundings. Sadly, many animals were seen exhibiting abnormal behaviors such as head bobbing and pacing as well as acute anxiety.

Imagine if you had to live forever in a small cage with no space to move or had to live your life with your feet chained…… and the horrors continue. Each one of you can help stop the use of animals for entertainment.

Good News has poured in the form of Trip Advisor’s (an online travel company) decision to not sell tickets of sightseeing experiences that involve physical contact with wild animals in captivity or close contact with endangered species including elephant rides. Those that represent the travel sector are increasingly promoting trips to wildlife parks instead, where people can safely view wildlife in its natural setting and glory! It’s a win-win situation as National Parks are developed to carry out and encourage conservation efforts.

Haathi Gaon, the elephant village in Amber, Jaipur is an initiative that allows tourists to have a glimpse of elephants playing, bathing and enjoying themselves unfettered in the open. However the tourism project that saw the light of day six years ago, was in reports recently for suffering a neglect at the hands of the local authorities and facing issues such as lack of drinking water or ponds for elephants, poor sanitation and lack of green cover among others.

The only way to help these defenseless beings created by god is to boycott every activity that uses elephants, tigers, dolphins, lions, monkeys and other animal species; simply suffering for some mindless human amusement.