If your program connects with community-based organizations that work with animals, and you want to follow best practices and avoid common pitfalls to students volunteering with animals, please read on for some valuable resources. If you’re a potential gap year student interested in volunteering with animals and interested in ethical best practices for doing so, we hope that this blog will be a useful resource for you as well.
While planning to work with animals, consider their wellbeing using the following framework. There are 5 universally-accepted rights established to protect animals living under human stewardship.
The 5 Freedoms for Animal Welfare
The Five Freedoms for Animal Welfare come from the American Humane Society (AHS), and the list below is Nora Livingstone’s adaptation of AHS’s principles to the context of volunteering with animals.
- Nutrition – factors that involve the animal’s access to sufficient, balanced, varied and clean food and water.
- Environment – factors that enable comfort through temperature, substrate, space, air, odor, noise, and predictability. *The amount of minimum required space varies from animal to animal. However, in general, the amount of space afforded to animals should allow them enough room to roam, run, swim, hide, den, engage in enrichment, and participate in other natural activities and behaviors we would see in the wild. Global and domestic or international standards vary on this as well.
- Health – factors that enable good health through absence of disease, injury, impairment, and healthy fitness level.
- Behavior – factors that provide varied, novel and engaging environmental challenges through sensory inputs, exploration, foraging, bonding, playing, retreating, and others.
- Mental State –the mental state of the animal should benefit from predominantly positive states, such as pleasure, comfort or vitality, while reducing states such as fear, frustration, hunger, pain, or boredom. Zoochosis is the abnormal animal behavior caused by time in captivity.
Program providers should avoid planning student activities that place students outside of their skillsets. Providers should also ask questions while engaging with community-based partner organization to get a sense for how they treat the animals in their care. Activities to avoid include but are not necessarily limited to: riding elephants, petting or playing dress-up with wild animals,, swimming with dolphins, feeding wild animals, walking cheetahs and lions on leashes (still common in South Africa), and having volunteers perform activities outside of their skill sets. Students don’t know what they don’t know. Therefore, the program provider must vet community-based organizations with which students will volunteer for projects involving animals.
Examples of community-based organizations where students may engage in service learning work include but are not necessarily limited to:
- Wildlife rehabilitation centers for (a) animal care & release, (b) permanent home for wildlife that can’t be released, and/or (c) rehabilitation for wild animals that will be released back into the wild
- Sea turtle hatcheries/ sea turtle monitoring or marine conservation centers
- Game reserve work (tracking/monitoring wildlife), national parks, conservation areas, and protected zones
- Domestic animal shelters & adoption centers
In general, avoid placing students in:
- Animal sanctuaries that breed animals into captivity. Since there is no agreed up definition of an ethical sanctuary, explaining that this term is hazy is a good idea
- Animal sanctuaries or reserves that support, promote, or allow canned hunting (usually lions)
- Animal sanctuaries that allow or promote inappropriate handling of wild animals (eg cuddling a tiger cub; swimming with dolphins in a contained area)
- Tourist locations that drug wild animals for the sole purpose of tourist interaction (e.g. Tiger Temple)
- Participating in feel-good data collection of no conservation value. Or programs that are not led by scientists and researchers
- Visiting or partnering in unethical sanctuaries that house animals in unsafe/unsanitary conditions, and in conditions in which animal habitats are small or cruelly unnatural compared to animal’s natural habitat
- Sanctuaries that purchase animals from illegal markets and/or don’t employ staff with the professional knowledge of how to care for animals correctly
- Attractions or “sanctuaries” where animals perform tricks
**Important note: there is no agreed-upon definition for the term ‘animal sanctuary.’ Anyone can use the term with no expectations for best practices around the term. For a list of organizations committed to ethical practices with animals, look into the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries (GFSA) and the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance (PASA). GFAS and PASA both advocate for animal rights and ethical engagement with animals on larger scales by setting standards for best practices.
Specific Concerns Working with Elephants:
The more we know about elephants, the more we see that interactions with humans are inherently stressful. Since elephants are non domesticated animals, all of them need to be broken and habituated to be around humans. Most ethical elephant centres have a long term goal of having less and eventually no contact between elephants and humans.
Swimming is a problem because it poses a significant risk for people to be around such large creatures and the elephants still need to have behavior modification to keep everyone safe. Centres are moving towards some scrubbing of the elephants (think massive car wash) but some behavioral studies have been showing this is quite unnecessary and should be tapered down and eventually done away with.F
For more information, read this article from World Animal Protection.
Specific Concerns Working with Primates: An example from South Africa
According to Blood Lions, anywhere between 8 000 and 10 000 predators, possibly more, are currently being held in small enclosures on almost 300 captive predator facilities across South Africa.
Consider the following: Do the program provider, community-based organization, and participants, all understand how animals are treated during community engagement activities, with the highest standards for ethics in mind and in practice? Program providers can research whether or not their prospective community-based partner organization keeps transparent records of donations and animal release and enrichment efforts.
Ideally, any activities involving animals are conducted only with animal sanctuaries led by medical staff trained as veterinarians, vet nurses, and techs. Only professionals and long-term volunteers have close contact with the animals in treatment. Also ideally, animal sanctuaries with which the gap year provider partners for student service learning offer more than just animal programing, including a holistic approach to conservation and animal welfare (tree planting, marine debris clean ups, domestic dog adoption campaigns, etc.).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nora Livingstone is the Founder and CEO of Animal Experience International (AEI). GYA is grateful for Nora’s work on the Ethical Engagement with Animals Standard as part of our *Fair Trade Learning rubric.
*GYA partners with the Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative to use their Fair Trade Learning (FTL) standards in the GYA Standards of Accreditation, adapting FTL principles to gap year education. Fair Trade Learning is extensively used beyond the Gap Year Association’s adaptation. The Forum on Education Abroad adopts FTL for their Guidelines for Community Engaged Learning Experiences Abroad for global higher education. Additionally, several colleges and universities as well as global education providers outside of the gap year field use FTL to guide their global education partnerships.
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