Photography and ... ethics? Part 2

Continuing on from last week, I found a short article on the impact of photography on a population of slender loris (Loris lydekkerianus) in India. The article can be accessed here. The slender loris is currently classified by the IUCN Red List as a Least Concern species. In the article, Kanagavel et al. found that most photos of slender lorises involved them being mishandled. This was done by analysing photos of lorises from India Nature Watch, a popular wildlife photography website in India. They found that 16 out of 28 cases involved the animals being mishandled. Even though the sample size is small (28 incidents), the article is useful in giving us an insight into this trade. Such activities seem to be commonplace as the villagers invited the research team to see a loris they had captured and it occurred over a wide area.

The article states that even though the locals perceive lorises to bring bad luck, they capture lorises for photographers to get paid. Such practices can have wider impacts on the environment. For example, in the article, a villager had to cut down 4 trees to restrict the movement of a loris.

Although the study only looked at the slender loris, I would foresee this type of unethical behaviour occurring more frequently in the future. With India’s rapidly rising middle-class population, more people would pick up the hobby, placing additional stress on India’s wildlife, not limited to the slender loris. However, it also brings up how citizens can help science through their observations.  For example, the photos suggest that the population of the two subspecies of slender loris overlapped contrary to previous information. I believe that photography can have a positive impact on conservation through the use of citizen science. However, steps have to be taken to dissuade unethical behaviours such as the type seen above.


On a separate note, I just received my copy of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert in the mail yesterday. Hopefully its an interesting and informative read.