How do you make wildlife photography ethics sexy??

Yes, I know, that sounds like a silly question. Having written a dissertaion specifically focussing on legislation and ethics, one of the questions I'm constantly asking is how to get more people to get more ethically savvy. Some of my own recent research has highlighted that many wildlife photographers are still operating with, at best, slightly ethically dodgy principles despite ethics being quite a hot topic recently. The thing is, there's plenty of material out there, with a plethora of guides available online but, it would seem, people just aren't reading them. So what can I do, how can I get these people on board? Referring back to the title, the point is, ethics doesn't exactly jump out at people as a particularly interesting subject so, thinking its all just down to common sense anyway, the majority of wildlife photographers seem to be ignoring the guides and just doing what they fancy, causing disturbance, using glass tanks containing live bait in order to get great shots of kingfishers, freezing insects in order to be able to easily manipulate them for photographic purposes or, finally, using tape lures or calling to get birds or other mammals to think there is a threat to their territory and use up unnecessary energy in order to go and investgate that threat. Yes, all these things happen. Now. In 2020.

In 2019 I stumbled across a fantastic guide from India entitled "Stop! Don't shoot like that - A simple guide to ethical wildlife photography".

Although it is uses examples directly taken related to Indian wildlife, it doesn't take too much to easily be able to relate it to UK wildlife. Rather than ram home dos and don'ts, it instead uses examples of known bad behaviours and discusses how these can be avoided and tries to add a little bit of humour by using clever illustrations to hammer home issues such as disturbance.

Perhaps the answer isn't to make ethics "sexy", maybe the answer is, instead, to make unethical behaviour "unsexy". If people realise, for example, that getting too close to otters can make them abandon their holts, quite often leading them to panic and leave their pups behind, which then leads to the pups starving to death, maybe, just maybe, they'll take a little bit more notice of ethical guides, or, at the very least, ensure that with every click of the shutter, they remember that the welfare of the species must always come before the shot.