An animal welfare literacy framework for tourism

As the expanding consciousness platform advances in tourism research and practice, the inclusion of animal welfare has increasingly become a topic of debate. However, research indicates that tourists continue to have difficulty assessing animals' welfare at wildlife tourism attractions, and so there is an immediate need for more education on such impacts. The purpose of this paper is to fill this education knowledge gap by introducing an environmental literacy framework, i.e., “what an environmentally literate person should know and be able to do,” in progressing from animal welfare illiteracy in tourism to literacy. The framework is applied to elephant tourism in Thailand using current knowledge on elephant welfare physiology, behaviour, and ethics.