Wildlife Conservation Projects in South Africa
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About
African Conservation Experience supports vital wildlife conservation projects in southern Africa. ACE works with sustainable and ethical African organizations to provide experiential opportunities year round. As a conservation volunteer you can be involved in animal care and rehabilitation, reserve management, wildlife surveys, veterinary work or marine conservation.
Wildlife Veterinary Experience: The Wildlife Veterinary Experience offers you the opportunity to join the day to day activities of an experienced wildlife veterinarian in South Africa. You could be assisting with wildlife capture, collar predators for research purposes, micro-chip the horn of a rhino or carry out pregnancy tests on rare antelopes.
Hanchi Horseback Conservation Project: You will patrol and manage a vast reserve in South Africa’s Limpopo province on horseback. Daily tasks include fenceline patrols, monitoring the reserve’s rhino population and helping with wildlife surveys. You’ll also be responsible for the equine care and habituating the horses to the bush on work rides.
Moholoholo Wildlife Rehabilitation Center: Moholoholo is home to a vast range of injured, poisoned and confiscated wildlife. As a volunteer, you’ll be directly involved in the daily care for all the animals, from feeding them and cleaning their enclosures, to nursing infant wildlife and helping with rehabilitation and release.
Phinda Wildlife Management Project: Phinda Game Reserve offers a huge biodiversity, being home to black and white rhino, elephants, lions, leopards, cheetah, buffalo, many antelope species and hundreds of different types of birds. The reserve management rely on volunteers to support the research taking place at Phinda to ensure that the wildlife populations are balanced and animal management is optimum within the reserve. This is a fantastic project for anyone who is interested in learning what it takes to manage a wildlife reserve!
Game Capture Team: Working with a dedicated mass and specialized capture team, you will be part of a local team relocating wildlife. You’ll be involved in all aspects of the work, from building capture enclosures to conducting the actual capture, quarantining and relocating the wildlife. Capture is exciting, hands-on work and you can expect to be in the thick of darting rhino, buffalo and giraffe or herding impala, zebra and wildebeest.
Coastal Conservation and Education Project: Based in scenic Plettenberg Bay on South Africa’s South coast, you’ll get to join the comprehensive marine conservation work done by this amazing project. You’ll monitor dolphin, whale and seal populations and help with hands-on conservation work like turtle and penguin rehabilitation or beach clean-ups. You will also be part of an established education program, visiting pre-schools to teach children about the environment at their doorstep.
Game Ranger Guide Course: This course is an ideal introduction to the wildlife and habitats of South Africa. You’ll learn the basics of tracking, wildlife and bird identification and navigation in the bush while in a vast reserve in the North of South Africa. Spending a night in the Kruger Park, you will explore the bush on foot before concluding with a full day workshop on identifying and handling dangerous snakes and reptiles.
Response from African Conservation Experience
Thank you Jamie for your feedback. Whilst we are disappointed to read your comments, we do appreciate your point of view and thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback.
It is clear from your comments that you did not enjoy your veterinary placement and we’re sorry to hear that. We ensure that we have an in depth conversation with every one of our travellers before they book their conservation trip to ensure that the placement they choose matches their expectations. After conversations with our sales team, including deciding between various projects you chose one of our veterinary placements.
During your placement you were exposed to valuable hands-on veterinary experience with a team of real vets. Work that you were involved in included chemical immobilisations to treat wounds, disease testing and parasite control. The team also work with production animals, something I believe you were keen to have exposure to and did. The busy team of vets that you were working with go out of their way to give students as much access as possible to all of the veterinary cases that they have. If on a rare occasion students are not able to visit an animal, this is for very specific reasons and not because the vets cannot be bothered. Working with real vets in the field, who will never undertake unnecessary procedures means that your workload will be varied and educational but the types of work and the animals you are working on are never guaranteed.
All meals, as well as your accommodation, internal transfers and 24/7 support from our in-country team are all included in our placements. The only exception to this being if you visit a local restaurant during your free time.
From the time that you set foot on South African soil you had 24/7 support from our in-country team. They are available to all of our travellers to ensure that they get the most out of their experience. It was not until your day of departure that they heard from you, which meant that they were not given the opportunity to either address your issues or to move you to a project which better matched your expectations.
Our vet placements provide valuable hands-on experience to our travellers, many of whom are considering veterinary as a career option or are currently studying veterinary sciences and wish to gain some real experience with African wildlife. We have been working with the vets you were placed with for 8 years and whilst we understand that it was not what you wished it to be, we have received much positive feedback from previous travellers.
We do wish you all the best in your future career. Both us, the vets and people on the ground could see your passion and they truly wish you all the best.