Why We Never Bait or Disturb Wildlife for a Photograph

Baiting is common practice in parts of wildlife photography. Food, audio calls or decoys are used to draw an animal into frame, sometimes just metres from the camera. It produces dramatic close-up images quickly. It’s also something we won’t do.

The True Cost of Baiting

Worldwide, photographers have repeatedly baited wildlife, leaving animals reliant on handouts and disrupting their natural hunting behaviour.

Big cats have been lured with tied livestock to guarantee a kill in frame, a practice banned in Indian tiger reserves since the 1980s, but one that still surfaces elsewhere. Polar bears drawn towards camps with food become associated with humans, and once a bear starts approaching people, it’s often destroyed as a safety precaution. Smaller predators fare no better when they’re chased or lured for a shot until they’re too stressed to hunt naturally.

But no matter the species involved, the result is the same: an animal becomes accustomed to human interaction and endures the long-term impact well after the photographer has left.

What We Do Instead

We use a mixture of blinds and vehicles to stop wary animals from being scared off. On our Arctic Fox winter tour, for example, we don’t feed the foxes at all, which results in more natural behaviour, and our clients capture images of them hunting prey on the beaches of Hornstrandir.

On our Churchill Polar Bear tour, we photograph from heated 4×4 vehicles at eye level, rather than the raised tundra buggies most operators use. This allows us to stay close enough to capture genuinely intimate images while keeping a safe distance for both the bear and the photographer. Patience and positioning get you close, not food.

On our Arctic Fox Cubs tour, also in Iceland, we don’t lure the cubs out to save time. We wait until they’ve emerged from the den naturally before visiting, even if that means a longer wait for the shot.

Why the No Baiting Approach Results in a Better Photograph

Major wildlife photography competitions have taken the same position we have. Wildlife Photographer of the Year, run by the Natural History Museum, now disqualifies any image involving baiting or luring, with only a narrow exception for disclosed scientific research. A baited image isn’t just an ethical compromise. To the industry’s most respected judges, it isn’t even eligible to be called wildlife photography.

One of our clients experienced this first-hand. On a winter Arctic Fox tour, they captured an image of a fox catching an eider duck mid-hunt, a moment of genuine, undisturbed predation rather than a staged encounter. That image went on to win numerous awards. It’s the kind of shot that simply isn’t possible with a baited animal, because the behaviour itself has to be real.

There’s a practical reason for this too. Baited images inevitably look the same. The same owl on the same perch, the same fox leaping for a thrown scrap. Genuine wild behaviour is unpredictable, creating unique photographs that truly stand out in competitions.

“Baiting gives you a guaranteed shot, but it’s the same shot everyone else gets,” says David Gibbon, founder of Wild Lens Nature Tours. “Waiting for genuine behaviour is harder and slower, but it’s the only way to come home with something no one else has, and it means the animal isn’t paying the price for our photograph.”

This standard of authenticity defines every expedition we run, as detailed in our approach to ethical wildlife photography.