CROCODILE TOURISM: THE EMASCULATION OF FEROCITY

Departing from Franklin's approach to the wild animal in tourism, and Cohen's typology of differentially framed settings, this article seeks to show that, as practices dealing with crocodiles moved from extermination in natural settings to interaction with tourists in different settings, the crocodile was emasculated and its perception was transformed from a dangerous, ferocious animal, to a pliable, pet-like one. The progressive exacerbation of that process is examined in a comparative study of crocodile tourism in three regions of the globe, in which different species of crocodilians constitute a significant tourist attraction: northern Australia, Florida in the US, and central Thailand. The article calls attention to the one-sidedness of current studies of tourist-crocodile encounters, which prioritize the tourists' experiences but disregard those of the crocodiles, and introduces some novel paradigmatic approaches to tourist-animal encounters, which could help to overcome this limitation.