#Selfies: The Unseen Shame

Social media platforms are packed with images of people posing with wild animals. But these moments of Insta-glory can come at a devastating cost.

- Sarah McPherson

A few quick taps on a small screen, and voilà – a selfie is snapped, tagged and broadcast to the world. Love it or loathe it, this 21st-century twist on the self-portrait is now part of our daily digital landscape and conversation. ‘Selfie’ was even the 2013 Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year.

Many a selfie trend has come and gone since phones with forward-facing cameras hit the market in 2003. The #wildlifeselfie, though, has not only endured, but taken on a life of its own among Instagram and Facebook’s billions of monthly users. In some cases, it’s harmless fun – even a force for good – but in most, it’s an egotistical game that can cause immeasurable harm to the creatures we seem so eager to showcase.

Loving wildlife to death

Any genre of wildlife photography should have welfare at the forefront, yet the very proximity involved in a selfie means ethics can be dismissed quicker than you can say narcissism. The most extreme examples have made headlines worldwide – the La Plata dolphin calf that reportedly died on an Argentinian beach in February 2016 after being hauled out of the surf and passed around a crowd of tourists, for instance; or the once-in-adecade poppy superbloom that blanketed the mountains outside the small Californian town of Lake Elsinore earlier this year, only to be unceremoniously trampled by tens of thousands of overeager Instagrammers.