Star attractions and damp squibs at the zoo: a study of visitor attention and animal attractiveness

ABSTRACT

The importance of this paper relates to the need to construct zoos that meet social and ethical obligations to be economically viable centres of both wildlife conservation and education in the twenty-first century. Recognizing the importance of the attractiveness of animals to the success of visitors’ zoo experience, this paper provides an analysis of the attractiveness of differing types of animals in a zoo setting. The paper is based on the data that was gathered in 2013 at Durrell Wildlife Park, UK, using a non-participant observation method that incorporated the collection of multiple types of verbal and visual data concerning visitor and animal behaviour. The animals studied possess differing levels of charisma and encompass a range of taxonomic categories. The results highlighted in this paper demonstrate that the ability of animals to attract and retain the attention of visitors varies significantly and suggests that the reasons behind this are related to a complex interaction of the characteristics that define animal attractiveness. However, the activity level of animals and their visibility appear to play a key role in determining the ability of an animal to attract and retain visitor attention.

KEYWORDS:

• Visitor attention
• animal attractiveness
• zoos

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Durrell Wildlife Park for helping to facilitate the research on which this paper is based.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Neil Carr is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Tourism at the University of Otago as well as the Editor of Annals of Leisure Research. His research focuses on understanding behaviour within tourism and leisure experiences; with a particular emphasis on animals, children and families, and sex. His recent publications include Dogs in the Leisure Experience, published by CABI (2014).

Notes

1. Leisure studies being broadly defined to encompass tourism studies.

2. During the observations it was clear that the visitors focused more on the pythons than the lizards, reflecting the fact that the former was more easily observable.

3. During the observations it was clear that the visitors focused more on the ducks than the starlings, reflecting the fact that the former was more easily observable.

4. It is clear from the observations undertaken that while people often visit the Wildlife Park in groups they do not necessarily constantly move around the park as a single unit. Consequently, the members of a group may not always arrive at or depart from an animal enclosure at the same time. The data in Figure 1 depicting length of time spent in each observation area is therefore not simply a measure based on each groups’ time spent in each area. Rather, where several different times were recorded for individuals or sub-groups of individuals within a group these have been used as part of the process of determining the average time spent in each research area.