Construction of captive wildlife tourism models in Malaysia

Wildlife tourism in captive settings such as Zoos is known as a place where visitors can interact with wildlife. Through those interactions, it has been proven in several literature reviews that zoos promote conservation awareness and produce positive behavioural changes in visitors. However, only a few research have been studied in demonstrating actual changes in visitors’, particularly in Malaysian visitors’. In this research, two different conceptual framework sets (pre-visit and post-visit) were posited in this research. The first part, two essential components in zoo visit based on literatures was used as the variables; the Visitor Voice and the Zoo Voice. It is aimed to create a categorization of characteristics that directly affect the visitors’ Conservation Consciousness. In the second part, it is aimed to measure the visitors’ Conservation Awareness on how they were influenced by the conservation messages provided from their previous zoo visit in their daily life. By measuring the visitors’ Conservation Awareness, the impact of zoos as a medium for conservation awareness towards Local Malaysians can then be assessed. The sampling sites chosen to represent local Malaysian zoos were Lok Kawi Wildlife Park, Zoo Negara, Taiping Zoo and Malacca Zoo. A structured, standardized questionnaire (pre-survey and post-survey), and field observation was used to achieve the expected results. Overall, there was a total of 769 and of 202 clean respondents were collected for the pre-visit and post-visit respectively. The data collected from the field was analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and Analysis of Moment Structure (AMOS) software program by adopting Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). SEM analyses revealed that both pre-visit and post-visit surveys have significant variance towards Conservation Consciousness and Conservation Awareness respectively. The factors affecting visitors’ learning was able to be categorize in the first part of the study. In the second part, the zoo visit has shown that there were actual changes occurs in the knowledge of the visitor, indicating the local zoo does have an impact towards its visitors. From this research, a baseline model elucidating each sampling site strengths were able to be constructed. This allows each sampling site to further improve its significance as a medium for conservation awareness, and likewise provide recommendation on what each zoo are lacking. The findings of this study are also important to contribute to the literature for behavioural changes in Malaysian, since limited researches were conducted specifically on long-term impact study