21 March 2025

Cartoons for Conservation: helping guides (and clients) to mammalwatch more ethically

I am pleased to share a set of cartoon guidelines that we hope will help local guides, in distant places, understand the finer points of mammalwatching.

All credit for these should go to two talented cartoonists Daniel Dahan and Matthew Steer, who very kindly volunteered their skills for the mammalwatching cause.

Many of the communities we visit are not familiar with dealing with foreigners. The very idea of ‘mammalwatching’ as a hobby can often be perplexing. I mean it is perplexing to most of my friends so consider how puzzled someone from a village deep in the rainforest might be when they see a bunch of people arrive carrying cameras from the other side of the world! While the guides we work with are usually excellent at finding wildlife, they don’t always understand what we want and what we think is ethical when it comes when interacting with wildlife. Many of us will have had to have an awkward conversation with a well-meaning but over enthusiastic guide that ends along the lines of …..”Honestly, thank you. But it is OK. You really don’t need to chop that tree down so we can get a better look at the animal hiding in the branches.”

So we have produced the cartoons that illustrate some of things to bear in mind when they take tourists mammalwatching. They will, I hope, help make the experience better for all humans and other mammals involved.

This idea came out of one of the mammalwatching community meetings in which we discussed the need to develop material that could be useful for communities and guides in newly discovered mammalwatching hotspots. And it is becoming more important as this hobby grows. The discovery of a mega-mammal species at a remote location can lead to a rapid surge in visitors. Consider the hundreds of people who have visited Klalik Village in West Papua after our report from May 2023 put it on the map. The tourism can be great for conservation: in Klalik they have stopped hunting in the forest around the village now that visitors are paying to see the animals. But an influx of tourists can also create problems of its own, especially if the mammalwatching isn’t undertaken ethically.

Daniel Dahan produced the three sets of cartoons here in English, French and Spanish.  And Matthew Steer produced an alternative – and very simple set – without text. They artwork is based on guidelines that drew on thinking by the IUCN’s Primate Specialist Group who have been looking at human-primate interaction. The work was also inspired through mammalwatching.com’s ongoing collaboration with re:wild. But although the cartoons focus on primates, the basic principles translate to all wildlife watching.

So if you are traveling somewhere remote – and I know many of you will be – please think about printing these out before you travel and leaving them with local communities. And if you do, I would love to know how they are received and whether or not they are clearly understood.

If you have suggestions on how to get these used and distributed please do let me know. Any tour operators reading? Maybe you could include these in your pre-trip reading package? Because sometimes it may be the clients – more than the local guides – who will benefit most.

Thanks

 

Jon

English (Daniel Dahan)

French (Daniel Dahan)

Spanish (Daniel Dahan)

Language Free (Matthew Steer)

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Jon Hall
Genetically Welsh, spiritually Australian, currently in New York City. I’ve also lived and worked in London, Canberra, Paris and Lusaka, and watched mammals in over 100 countries.
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