Habituating wild primates to human presence for tourism generates economic benefits for conservation but introduces welfare risks that require careful management.
Primate tourism creates a genuine welfare tension: habituation and visitor access fund conservation that protects primate populations and habitat, but each tourist visit introduces disease transmission risk to individual animals. Respiratory pathogens to which humans are resistant can be lethal to great apes. The welfare risk is not hypothetical — respiratory disease outbreaks in habituated gorilla groups have caused deaths. Welfare-responsible primate tourism requires strict adherence to minimum distance protocols, health screening of visitors, mask requirements, and limiting daily visitor numbers. When individual animals show signs of illness, group visits must stop until recovery. The balance between conservation revenue generation and individual animal welfare risk must be managed actively rather than assumed to be automatically acceptable.