Animal Volunteer Work

We find the best volunteer projects with animals for you, help you with all the arrangements and provide lots of support before and during your volunteering time abroad! Pod Volunteer is an award-winning non-profit organisation helping people to volunteer with animals for as little as 1 week or as long as 1 year.

Whether it’s volunteering with elephants in Thailand, caring for turtles in Greece, or helping rescued sloths in Costa Rica, volunteers are needed all year round to support the enormous work that goes into caring for animals. For example, the wildlife rescue team in Thailand look after over 900 animals so our volunteers are kept very busy helping to prepare food for each day!

We are committed to ensuring that the animal projects that we work with offer the highest standards of animal welfare and work with Right Tourism, an organisation which helps people to stay animal-friendly whilst travelling.

Our animal volunteer work adheres to the Five Freedoms: freedom from hunger or thirst by ready access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health and vigour; freedom from discomfort by providing an appropriate environment including shelter and a comfortable resting area; freedom from pain, injury or disease by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment; freedom to express (most) normal behaviour by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind; freedom from fear and distress by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering.

We only support rescued animals or where they are in a wild environment, and we don’t support elephant volunteering projects where elephant riding for tourism takes place. We also don’t offer volunteering with lion cubs. You can read our full animal welfare policy here.

Ultimately, we believe that where possible wild animals belong in the wild, in their natural environment where they can display their natural behaviours. We do however also accept that there are some cases where this is not possible and the best alternative is animals being kept in a sanctuary, as close to their natural habitat as possible.

Below you’ll find our carefully selected range of projects volunteering with animals which you can click through to and find out about the volunteer role, location, accommodation and costs, see lots of pictures and read volunteer reviews!

We also have a range of conservation volunteering projects which may be of interest as they often involve animals too as part of a wider overall conservation or research project.

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