Some of Cayman’s most popular tourist attractions were put under the microscope in a discussion of the ethics of eco-tourism at the University College of the Cayman Islands last week.
Deborah Beal, an environmental science lecturer at the university, suggested that money-spinning tourism ventures across the Caribbean were potentially damaging the environment.
She said Cayman, and other countries in the region, had important decisions to make about how they handled tourism growth and whether a more “eco-centric” approach was required.
She said activities like swimming with dolphins, petting stingrays at the sandbar, and playing with turtles at the Turtle Farm, were primarily profit driven and not particularly good for the animals.
“Swimming with the dolphins, at first glance it doesn’t seem to do much harm, the dolphins are raised in captivity, they are trained to allow humans to interact. It seems to be an okay activity.
“Most people get a big kick out of it and maybe begin to get an appreciation for dolphins. It sounds fine till you look at what a normal dolphin migration pattern is. Their range in the wild is thousands of miles and now we are keeping them in basically a swimming pool. It would be like us being kept in one room of our house for our whole lives, despite the fact that we are social creatures.”
Speaking at UCCI’s conference, Towards a Corruption Free Caribbean, she raised similar concerns about the Turtle Farm and, to some extent, Stingray City. She said future generations would have to decide if they wanted to take a less exploitative more eco-centric approach to animal-based activities.
“We have to decide whether we are going to teach respect for nature to children at the grade schools and hope that when they get to be adults, they will make choices that don’t have profit as the primary motive for interaction.”
She acknowledged that where jobs, money and the environment were in competition, protection of species and their habitats were unlikely to win the day, citing the current debate over whether to build a road through part of the Mastic Trail as an example of nature and development in competition.
“What do most people think is more important having income from new jobs and construction and selling million dollar houses on a golf course or protecting a few parrots and a few trees and our blue iguanas?”
She warned that similar choices were being made across the Caribbean, the cumulative effect of which was eroding the region’s natural beauty. The Caribbean is one of around 20 biological hotspots in the world – areas of rare beauty and unique species not found anywhere else.
She suggested a more “observation” form of animal interaction, such as kayaking tours, might be a better form of eco-tourism.
“Every time we turn around, there are choices that need to be made as to whether we have nature or we turn into a developed island that has lost most of our natural beauty because of these activities,” she said.
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