Animal rescue tourism: digital technology-enhanced approaches to support voluntourist engagement, animal welfare and rights

Animal ethics is a critical concern in the tourism industry with numerous accounts of unethical and exploitative practices. Not-for-profit animal rescue organisations, like Animal Aid Unlimited, offer a counter experience to this largely negative narrative by redefining tourist-animal interactions through volunteer tourism, where visitors help to rescue domesticated street animals, who are rarely included in tourism research. To address the lacuna in the academic literature, this study utilises a multi-method approach to build a case study to explore how such organisations can engage voluntourists to promote animal welfare and rights. Findings show that Animal Aid engages digital technology-enhanced approaches, especially information and communication technologies and social media, to heighten awareness and engagement in animal welfare and rights in part through tourism. The theory is hence proposed that while seemingly incongruous, some niche forms of tourist-animal interactions can support an animal rights ethic. As such, animal rescue tourism emerges as a seemingly distinct and alternative animal-based tourism experience requiring more research, especially in a digital era.