ANIMAL WELFARE GUIDELINES

1.Tree Hugger Travel’s Welfare and Wildlife Position

We actively discourage Tree Hugger Travel customers to participate in activities that exploit or harm animals, whether they are wild or domesticated animals.

2. Purpose of these Guidelines

These guidelines aim to provide guidance for responsible activities involving animals on our recommended tours, experiences and itineraries. These guidelines are used by Tree Hugger Travel staff members and customers to assist with:

• Designing trips and managing requests for experiences which involve wild or domesticated animals.
• The assessment of the health, safety and best management of wild and domestic animals during Tree Hugger Travel recommended tours, experiences and itineraries.
• Understanding the difference between wild and domesticated animals and why as a result the welfare of wild animals is always compromised when kept and used for tourist entertainment.

3. Animal Welfare Basics

Animal welfare concerns the health of the animal’s body and mental state. The following Five Domains of animal welfare model, the universally known principles for defining basic welfare needs, have been considered in forming these guidelines:

• Nutrition – factors that involve the animal’s access to sufficient, balanced, varied and clean food and water;
• Environment – factors that enable comfort through temperature, substrate, space, air, odour, noise and predictability;
• Health – factors that enable good health through absence of disease, injury, impairment and good fitness level;
• Behaviour – factors that provide varied, novel and engaging environmental challenges through sensory inputs, exploration, foraging, bonding, playing, retreating and others;
• Mental State – by presenting positive situations in the previous four functional domains, the mental state of the animal should benefit from predominantly positive states, such as pleasure, comfort or vitality, while reducing negative states such as fear, frustration, hunger, pain or boredom.

<aside> 💡 DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WILD AND DOMESTIC ANIMALS

Tree Hugger Travel recognises and respects the fundamental difference between wild and domesticated animals. Domesticated animals, such as dogs or horses, have undergone generations of selective breeding, resulting in notable genetic differences from their wild ancestors. As a result, they are more adapted to captive conditions and generally more manageable.

However, this domestication process has not occurred for wild animals. Iconic species like elephants, tigers, and monkeys, often exploited for tourism and entertainment, remain inherently wild. In Australia, we also consider animals like crocodiles, snakes, birds, and other species in this category.

We firmly believe that the welfare of wild animals is significantly compromised in captivity, and we endorse captivity only when it is genuinely in the animal's best interests and adheres to the highest possible standards of care (see Section 6). This principle is applicable not only in Australia but also resonates with our global concern about wildlife abuse in various parts of the world.

Tree Hugger Travel is against crocodile farms and crocodile exploitation in Australia.

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