You might have seen my blog post I did last night about my Indonesia trip. This is a little carry on from that.
Whilst we were there, we visited a coffee plantation. As soon as we got inside, we saw some small monkeys and baby deer inside a very tiny and dirty cage. All of the animals were visibly distressed. I asked the staff how often the animals were let out of their cages and they said never.
At first I didn’t want to go near the animals as I didn’t want the staff to see another tourist fawning over ‘cute animals’ in horrific conditions, so I held back. After a while I decided that I would approach the cages so that I could hopefully capture what would be some emotive portraits of them, that would make people want to donate to the Bali Animal Welfare Association to help their cause.
I was obviously pretty upset seeing the conditions these beautiful animals were kept in, but the thing that upset me most was that I had unknowingly contributed to the cruel practice by visiting the plantation in the first place, as I’m usually pretty careful about these things.
The BAWA website has some great info about responsible tourism, which I wish I had read up on before we went to Indonesia. A lot of it is common sense but there are some tips in there for stopping further cruelty in places where you wouldn’t think it existed.
We saw a few other incidents of animal cruelty in Bali, and I’m ashamed to say that most of them were for the tourists benefit.
We had an absolutely beautiful time in Indonesia, but what would make it even more beautiful would to be abolish the cruel practices against animals, as with a lot of places (the whole world basically). That’s a pretty big ask, but any donations to the BAWA association will help a little as well as travelers who are clued up on responsible tourism.
Here is a link to donate :)
http://bawabali.com/donate-to-bawa/
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