Volunteering with animals holidays

Volunteering with animals doesn’t necessarily mean you will be getting up close with the animals. In fact in some instances, such as volunteering at orangutan sanctuaries in Borneo, the aim is for the animals to have as little contact with people as possible so they can be reintroduced to the wild. You will be expected to get your hands dirty, whether that’s chopping up fruit and vegetables for peckish pachyderms, planting trees or cleaning out enclosures. But morale is always high on these trips – there is the camaraderie of fellow volunteers, and the knowledge that your efforts are making a genuine difference.

Volunteering with orangutans in Borneo, in places like Matang Wildlife Centre in Sarawak or Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Sanctuary in Kalimantan, is hard but immensely rewarding work. Your role, collaborating with other volunteers and permanent local staff, will be to help rehabilitate orphaned orangutans and support their return to the wild. Daily tasks include enrichment activities, maintaining feeding platforms and play frames, and reforestation. Volunteers stay in self-catering lodges, and in your downtime you can visit Iban longhouses, go trekking or tour bustling night markets.

Some of our most popular volunteering with animals holidays take place in elephant sanctuaries in countries such as Thailand and South Africa. Volunteers engage in a range of tasks from preparing nutritious meals to observation, helping bathe old and frail animals and creating enrichment activities. In most cases, elephants will have been rescued from the tourism industry and will spend the rest of their lives in the sanctuary, so the efforts of volunteers is greatly valued. On other trips, such as in Namibia, volunteers work with wild elephants, helping patrol desert wilderness to reduce conflict between herds and local communities.

If you want to bring the kids along for a memorable week or two, several of our volunteering with animals holidays welcome families. Popular destinations and activities include monitoring turtles nesting on beaches in Greece and Costa Rica, helping at orangutan sanctuaries in Borneo and wildlife sanctuaries in South Africa where you’ll be working with big cats. While allowances can sometime be made for animal-mad younger children, these rewarding trips are best suited to teenagers as they do involve several hours of physical labour each day. But you may be amazed how hard your kids will work when it comes to pulling together as a team.