Volunteer in Ecuador with Volunteering Solutions

Volunteering Animals Conservation in Ecuador

The different Rescue Centers in Ecuador all have one thing in common and that is that they are founded and run by people that love animals and who have seen how animals are suffering just to please somebody´s need for a trophy of an exotic pet. The government and the police look for and try to stop trafficking and when they find the animals they bring them to one of the centers but after that its up to the center to feed and take care of the animals as the government doesn´t contribute with anything. This makes it heard as the centers needs to get money for food, material and equipment to keep the animals in a good environment and that's why they need to allow visitors that can pay a small entrance fee at the same time as they can learn about what happens to the animals, how they live, what they live of etc. Many of the centers also have Ecuadorian students that comes for seminars to learn about animals and their environment as a part of their education but also younger children comes on visits to hopefully get more respect for taking care of our nature more than their parents.

The purpose of the centres are to take care of the animals that have been confiscated from trafficking or from people that had them as pets. In any case they often get seriously injured since they are tremendously abused by people. In the case of the monkeys for example they sometimes have broken their waist due to the chain they have around their waist while being pets.

As most animals who come to the centers cant be placed back to their natural environment again they are given food and shelter. The reason why they cant be placed out back in nature are different form animal to animal but amongst many problems they for example are

-tame after living with and around humans so they would go back humans and get caught again, killed or hurt someone.
-they have had their claws operated away and can no longer hunt.
-they were born in captivity and don't know how to hunt.
-they don't behave as wild animals and wound be rejected by their own kind.

The centres has animals like lions, monkeys, parrots, turtles, ocelots, sloth's, anacondas, Different species of rodents, tapirs etc but this can change from time to time and from center to center..