Tourism, Security and Safety From Theory to Practice

part of the attraction. Almagor (1985), for example, talks about the challenges
faced by African safari guides in preventing tourists from getting into dangerous
situations with wildlife. This exploration of the motivations of the two groups
highlighted a difference in their motivations, with guides concerned about visitor
safety and the visitors seeking challenging and life-changing experiences through
close contact with the animals. Several authors in the area of adventure or high-
risk recreation and tourism have noted that for some individuals a core element of
the experience is the risk (Grant et al., 1996; Robertson, 1999; Ryan, 2003). While
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the authors could find no studies of the motivations of visitors seeking close con-
tact with dangerous wildlife species, anecdotal evidence and the existence of cer-
tain forms of tourism, such as swim with shark tours, suggest that there exists a
group of tourists who deliberately seek high-risk encounters with wildlife such as
bears, sharks, and other large predators. One of the few studies of relevance here
(Galloway and Lopez, 1999) found that visitors to national parks who scored
highly on a sensation seeking scale and sought high-risk adventure activities were
also more likely than others to actively seek interactions with wildlife and less
likely to state that they would avoid potentially dangerous wildlife.
Ryan (2003) and Page and Meyer (1996) note that tourists are also likely to
engage in risky behaviors because they often find themselves in unfamiliar settings
with limited knowledge. In this instance the tourist is not seeking a high-risk
encounter. A number of negative wildlife encounters can be explained by this phe-
nomenon. The critical incidents study described in a previous section highlighted
the unexpected nature of many negative wildlife encounters and the prevalence of
food or wildlife feeding as a factor in negative encounters. So a second type of risk
with regard to wildlife and tourists is that of tourists engaging in behaviors that
they do not perceive as risky but which can have negative outcomes. In some cases
the behaviors may be prompted by a desire to get closer to the wildlife and this is
likely to occur in situations where the animal is attractive but not perceived as dan-
gerous. One particular management challenge in this category is that of discour-
aging tourists and tour operators from feeding wildlife. Such feeding is often
associated with negative encounters between visitors and birds and mammals such
as monkeys and kangaroos. In other cases the behaviors may simply reflect a lack
of knowledge about the presence of particular species and/or how to avoid risky
situations. This is most likely to occur with animals that are not attractive.