In-depth guides for donors
Long-form research on how donations are spent, how to verify an organisation, and what crypto changes about giving. Written to be useful before you donate anywhere — including here.
Wildlife Sanctuary Ethics Evaluator & Due Diligence Checker
Audit any wildlife rescue or sanctuary against 7 objective GFAS animal welfare and anti-exploitation standards.
What CITES Appendix I, II and III actually control
CITES does not decide how close a species is to extinction. It decides which papers are required before a specimen crosses a border.
Read the articleIUCN criteria for extinction
Critically Endangered is not a slogan. It means a species meets one of the IUCN Red List criteria at the most severe threshold. The five criteria are set out below.
Read the articleWhy culling street dogs doesn’t reduce street dogs
Removing dogs from a street creates space, food access and breeding opportunity for the dogs that remain. Within a season the population is back. This is a resource problem, and it has a well-evidenced answer that most cities still resist.
Read the articleMigratory species in 2026: what the UN interim report found
Nearly half of the migratory species covered by a global UN wildlife treaty are declining. The 2026 update also records recoveries, better migration maps and a clearer case for protecting whole routes rather than isolated sites.
Read the articleRhino conservation: what works
Rhino conservation does not work as a single gadget or a one-off campaign. The populations that stabilised used layered protection for years.
Read the articleElephant conservation economics: crop damage, tourism and the cost of coexistence
An elephant is an asset on a lodge brochure and a liability in a farmer's field — often the same animal on the same evening. Conservation that ignores the ledger on the farmer's side produces poaching complicity and political backlash against parks.
Read the articleHabitat restoration vs species focus: where conservation money works hardest
Species programmes produce names donors recognise. Habitat programmes produce fungi nobody photographs. Both can save the same forest elephant population — or neither can, if funding picks the wrong lever for the landscape.
Read the articleThe poacher is the cheapest part of the chain
Arrests at the source are the most reported and least disruptive form of wildlife crime enforcement, because the person who pulled the trigger is the most replaceable participant and the smallest earner in the entire chain.
Read the articleRescue is the easy part: what happens after
The photograph is always the rescue. The measurable question is whether the animal was alive and free a year later — and most organisations do not know, because finding out is expensive and finding out badly is worse than not claiming.
Read the articleCommunity conservancies explained: when landowners become wildlife partners
A fence around a park tells neighbours the wildlife inside is the government's problem. A conservancy contract that pays villages when elephants pass through tells them the wildlife is an asset — provided the money arrives on time and the governance is real.
Read the articleThe cheapest way to save a predator is a better fence
Anti-poaching gets the funding and the imagery. In many landscapes the larger cause of death for large carnivores is a farmer who lost livestock last night — and that is a problem with cheap, unglamorous, well-evidenced solutions.
Read the articleThe exotic pet trade and the sanctuary pipeline that must absorb it
The exotic pet trade is marketed on social media as tame tigers and talking monkeys. When law enforcement works, the bill lands at sanctuaries that did not create the problem and cannot say no without condemning the animal to worse.
Read the articleHow to tell an ethical sanctuary from an attraction
Almost every facility that charges tourists to hold a baby animal describes itself as a sanctuary or a rescue. The word carries no legal weight in most jurisdictions, so donors have to test the structure rather than the vocabulary.
Read the articleWhat anti-poaching actually costs
Campaign images show drones and thermal cameras. Real protection budgets are dominated by boots, salaries and fuel — and the reason poaching persists in a well-equipped reserve is usually that the payroll ran out, not that the technology did.
Read the articleWildlife corridors and the problem of habitat fragmentation
A national park that looks intact on a wall map can function as an island. Animals inside breed with a shrinking pool, crops outside become the only food source, and the corridor on a PowerPoint slide turns out to need twenty years of land negotiation to exist.
Read the articleWhat lifetime care for a large mammal actually costs
Rescuing a confiscated elephant or tiger generates photographs and donations. Keeping that animal for thirty years generates payroll, hay invoices and surgical bills that outlast every campaign. Most facilities that fail do so quietly, years after the rescue story ended.
Read the articleInvasive species and native wildlife: when ecosystem repair becomes rescue work
A ship rat on an seabird island does not make a fundraising video. It eats eggs faster than volunteers can count chicks. By the time the colony collapses, the invasive problem looks like mysterious decline rather than a predator someone could have removed.
Read the articleVeterinary wildlife medicine costs: what rescue triage actually bills
A snared leopard needs immobilisation drugs, a field team, radiography, surgery, antibiotics and months of recovery. The invoice arrives before the fundraising video goes viral, and half the line items do not photograph well.
Read the articleMarine wildlife rescue basics: stranding, entanglement and triage at the shoreline
Crowds gather. Someone pours water on a dolphin. Someone else tries to drag it back to sea. Without trained response, good intentions accelerate shock, injury and death — and may violate laws protecting IUCN-listed species.
Read the articleWildfire and wildlife response: triage when the landscape burns
A koala with burned paws makes global news. Thousands of reptiles, ground mammals and nestlings die uncounted in the same fire. Response capacity is finite, triage is brutal, and the season after the fire kills animals who return to a landscape with no cover and no food.
Read the articleWildlife voluntourism: what goes wrong and why good intentions are not enough
The volunteer who flew twelve hours to bottle-feed an orphaned cheetah cub usually meant well. The facility that sold that experience usually meant to stay open. Those two intentions collide in ways that produce animals who can never be released and communities whose skilled jobs were replaced by paying tourists.
Read the articleCamera traps and patrol data: turning footsteps into decisions
Twelve rangers walking random routes is twelve salaries spent on hope. The same twelve rangers deployed where camera traps showed snare density doubling last month is a programme. The difference is not the drone. It is the notebook — or its digital equivalent.
Read the article