A beautiful naturalist with her beautiful mission !

volunteering at my local shelter with the dog

World Wide Animal Society: Small charity, big mission!
Maybe I should tell you a little bit about myself first and introduce myself on a more personal level. I am currently a student in the United Kingdom doing a degree in zoo-biology, however I am not so much your typical student!

I have always wanted to look after and work with animals, even from a young age, although mum wasn’t always happy about me bringing snails into the house, I loved it. Although my favorite animal is the Orca, I do have a big passion for Felids and Canids (cats and dogs of all sizes). Despite this i have had many wonderful opportunities to interact with exotic animals such as dolphins, lemurs, alligators, beluga whales, tigers and sea lions to name but a few, most of them were however in captivity, i also work voluntary at my local shelter.

I did a small project looking at endangered species, and realized how important they are to the world and how much they need to be saved, and I decided I wanted to make a difference.

I noticed how people say “there needs to be change”, but then sit there and do nothing about it, well what use is that! This is why I have decided to dedicate myself to make a difference.

The world wide society has a lot of aims, but they are to me and others, absolute necessities. However our main aim above everything else is to protect and conserve endangered species before its too late, and most of our other aims link in with this, such as educating not only children in the UK but children in the area’s where the endangered species live.

When I say we, I mean the members of WWAS and I, but we also think that to help the species, you have to help the people that live around these precious species, as providing them with seeds for crops, and other simple necessities may help reduce poaching.

Education is extremely important, the more you know about a species the more you can help it, and if I ever have children, I would not like them to grow up in a world where beautiful animals are going extinct, due to us not taking any action.

We also take pride in working towards run down zoo’s or zoo’s that are not up to high standards, we also want it to be made by law that all mammals kept in zoo’s worldwide should be provided with enrichment. Enrichment prevents boredom, and is also good for the animals mental state, to keep an animal ‘happy’ its mental state must be stimulated by new things, why keep animals such as bears which need something to do and provide them with 4 walls and a concrete floor, most end up self mutilating out of bordom, to us it seems that if no enrichment is provided it is somewhat cruel.

How would you like to spend a lifetime, behind bars staring at a wall and pacing up and down? I for one know that I would probably rather be euthanized. We want to set regulations around the world for what is suitable to have, and what isn’t, for example size of enclosures. Some zoo’s are in such awful conditions, and nothing is being done about it, most of them containing endangered species, shameful.

Another one of our aims is to stop cruelty, now we have all seen some shocking animal cruelty videos, with the owners getting minimal jail and low fines, why? It’s ok to kill an animal apparently in cruel ways and get a pretty useless sentence with a usually small fine, however it’s a completely different story when we kill one of our own species.

So what we wish to do about this is tackle cruelty full on, a lot of nonprofit shelters all over the world simply don’t have enough money to house all of the animals, and so many are put to sleep daily, and this is one thing we will be looking at in the future. We will try and support some shelters so more animals don’t have to face that lethal injection, we will also be looking at doing a spaying and neutering campaign. As for cruelty, we really want to push sentences, fines and bans to a much higher level. We want more action to be taken when a serious act of cruelty takes place, we want the ban on keeping animals for life to be used more, higher fines and longer jail sentences.

Cruelty takes place in many forms, from abusing animals such as kicking them, to starving them or skinning them alive – all are cruel and none of them should take place, but they do, and they all happen millions of times a day all over the world. Poaching in some countries is taken very lightly, where as other countries take it more seriously, we want it to be taken seriously everywhere, especially when they are killing animals that are almost extinct, don’t you?

Moving on! As we get more donations, we really want to conduct research on endangered species to learn more about them, as understanding them could actually be the key to actually saving them, research is absolutely critical to understanding anything!

A new project we are starting to work on and develop is ‘Animal India’. When all details are finalized, we want to build education centers around the places in India that are close to tiger populations. We then aim to send uniforms and equipment such as binoculars for the rangers who guard the tigers, and also provide seeds and other necessities for the locals in the village hoping they will use these instead of resorting to poaching.

Your help and support is extremely precious to us. 

Much love and care
Nicola & World Wide Animal Society 

Nicola Marsh* The Author is a founder of World Wide Animal Society in Southwell, Nottingham, United Kingdom, She may be reached at worldwideanimalsociety@gmail.com