It's the #selfiepolice!

An ongoing source of frustration for zoo and aquarium professionals has been the enormous popularity of wild animal selfies.  These usually come in two forms.

In one, an actual wild animal is captured by people for a spur-of-the-moment photo-op.  Sometimes, the animal in question is in obvious distress, such as a dolphin that has become beached and, instead of doing anything useful, everyone grabs their iPhone.  In other cases, it can be less obvious.  Suppose that you and some friends are out hiking and you spot a desert tortoise.  Everyone picks it up and passes it around for pictures - and the tortoise unloads its bladder, which is kind of what tortoises do.  Everyone laughs, it's gross, finishes with their pictures, and puts the tortoise down to go on its merry way, right?  Well, maybe not really "right" - because that tortoise just shed its water stores... and it's the desert.

The second scenario involves animals that are held in captivity for the express purpose of selling photo opportunities to tourists.  Maybe it's a sloth, or a monkey, or a declawed tiger cub.  Most of us inherently feel these are wrong.



Recently, instagram made it its policy to post a warning for searches of pictures of people posing with animals (i.e. - #slothselfie) on the grounds that these pictures promote unsafe or harmful conditions for animals (similar to how posts that seem to advocate, say, suicide might be barred)..  It's a step that shows a lot of initiative in slowing the craze of wildlife selfies...

Though I do feel like I have to play devil's advocate here for a moment.  We have a lot of ambassador animals with our zoo's education collection, and some of them are touchable by members of the public, under the direct supervision and control of zoo staff.  If a parent takes a pictures of little Billy petting a ball python and posts it, is that in violation of this policy.  I have a ton of pictures of myself with animals accumulated over the years, though I tend not to post those on social media.  I also, however, have a few pictures of myself in field conservation work - say, holding hellbenders for measurements, or displaying snakes that I've caught as part of a field survey.  Do those count as "harmful" wildlife selfies?  Sure, those were taken as part of legitimate scientific work... but what if it was just me out herping with some friends?  What if we display pictures of what we found before releasing it?

These are all things we'll have to be wary of as this new policy sets in, and it may be necessary for some corrections to be made.  We've done it in the past - MasterCard said at one point that they would no longer support animal attractions (mostly with exploitative photo-ops in mind), but when it was brought to their attention that this impacted zoos and aquariums, they reversed course.  For now, let's hope that this is simply a positive step in limiting the spread of images that encourage people to treat exotic animals as toys rather than living things.