Mountain gorilla tourism has funded conservation that dramatically increased gorilla populations but creates direct welfare risks through disease transmission and habituation.
Mountain gorilla tourism creates a genuine welfare tradeoff: the revenue funds conservation that has grown the population from 620 to 1,000+ individuals, but the required habituation and proximity create disease transmission risk for immunologically naive gorillas. Strict protocols requiring 7-meter minimum distances, masks, and exclusion of sick tourists reduce but cannot eliminate transmission risk. Habituated gorillas lose normal wariness of humans, potentially increasing vulnerability to poaching. The welfare calculus appears positive overall given population growth, but individual gorillas infected by tourist-transmitted respiratory disease pay a direct welfare cost for the conservation funding that benefits the population.