In Harbin, the tenth largest city in China, there are two parks that breed Siberian Tigers. Visitors to the park can purchase a variety of animals from a Chinese Duck ($5) to a whole cow ($330). But these aren’t to bring home. Once purchased tourists can watch their animals being fed to the tigers while snapping pictures (disturbing but true). This seems like a good win win situation to me, tourists pay to go into the park which helps support the parks operations, and then those same tourists pay to feed the cats!
To me this is a bit like plastic bags in stores. By not providing plastic bags for free, stores are now making a profit by selling something that had always been seen as their responsibility to provide. There are many studies around sustainability and what consumers are and are not willing to pay extra for. Generally people say they aren’t willing to pay more, but then they do. If a Siberian Tiger Park can get customers to pay to feed the cats, what else are we willing to spend out money on, in particular in sustainability, if marketed in the right way?
Bryan Jake
What a great concept! The Chinese can be entrepreneurs too at a bigger scale. This reminds me of the vending machines at zoos where a quarter got you duck feed… shoot just buy the whole duck and feed it to a tiger at 20 times the cost to the customer – not bad! Let them feed the ducks too.
We need more places like this in the US – maybe animals eating each other or fighting for their life – sounds illegal…
How about the concept of people getting paid for visiting and getting paid for their membership?! More you show up and feed – you get your membership discounted … at a % return of course – people will talk about that! How about making a new Gold’s Gym chain where you plug in your card and it tracks how many calories you burned that actually turned into kWs of energy by using your kinetic energy into electricity like a hamster! I’d prefer to workout outside or play sports, but if you were paying me to turn my potential (fat energy) into kinetic energy moving an elliptical or plates of weights — roll that concrete wheel Freddy Flintstone!