Your wildlife selfies are hurting the animals, study finds

Whether it's swimming with dolphins, feeding

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monkeys or riding elephants, our compulsion to snap, post and share wildlife selfies is contributing to the exploitation of animals.

That's the conclusion in a new report from World Animal Protection (formerly World Society for the Protection of Animals), which used a Canadian company's "social listening" research to analyze hundreds of thousands of images on social media.

While not all wildlife tourism is harmful, there are examples all over the world of animals being used for profit in ways that inflict suffering on them or endanger them.

"One of the biggest culprits is the growing popularity of wildlife selfies where tourists, with the help of tour operators, capture and share images of themselves with wild animals — exploiting them as photo props," WAP says in the report released this week.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/wildlife-selfies-good-and-bad-1.4340944