It’s one school of thought that animals should be left to their own devices and the natural order; but many conservationists believe that we must now work with animal projects more closely if we are to help protect them and their environments.
The old mantra(s)
At one time, animals were regarded as a virtually limitless resource, to be either exploited or disregarded. Even if they were ignored (about the best outcome they could hope for) then their habits and natural environments were seen as being ripe for use as and when humans wished to. Growing environmental awareness led to increasing efforts in the areas of animal conservation, but this itself has gone through several cycles of evolution.
In the early days of such work, direct ‘hands on’ intervention was typically the approach – and it must be said, sometimes rather heavy-handedly. Unfortunately, this led to problems simply because people did not always fully understand the complexities of environmental interactions and that their well-intentioned actions were, in fact, not necessarily in the longer-term best interests of animals or their environments. A reaction against this led, in more recent years, to an approach that was almost ‘hands off’ in its attempts to minimise human intervention. This, in turn, led to some problems.
Today’s philosophy if you work with animal conservation projects
As conservationists adopted a much more cautious and data-collection oriented approach, there was some criticism that, increasingly, nothing concrete was actually being done as environments deteriorated. Some, perhaps unkindly, called this “paralysis by analysis”. Modern conservationists have now typically accepted some basic principles:
• humanity has now had a global effect on vast numbers of species – this is ongoing and it may not be practical to now entirely disengage;
• some situations are bad, bordering critical – a ‘do nothing’ approach may be catastrophic;
• intervention should be conducted as gently, and with as light a touch, as possible.
Your help is needed
In places such as India and Southern Africa, there are numerous opportunities to take conservation breaks during gap years or holidays. If you’d like to work with animal projects and do your bit to help manage a balance between them and humankind, your skills and time can be extremely usefully deployed. Here is a just a brief sample of where you may be able to help on a conservation holiday:
• helping to conduct surveys of the main prey herds of one of Africa’s ‘Big Cat’ predators to see whether their numbers are in decline or not;
• visiting local villagers in India as part of a tiger education and co-existence programme;
• examining on-site, the spoors of various species to investigate their overall diet and health;
• the electronic tagging and cataloguing of selected animals and the data collection/interpretation from satellite tracking systems.
This is something entirely different to contemplate while you’re on a gap year and opportunities exist to work with many varied species on several continents. So, if you would like to work with animal projects and help play your part in modern conservation efforts, a first step would be to find out more.