We are fortunate to share this planet with such a beautiful and diverse range of creatures, but we take that for granted all too often. Human activity can cause mass suffering for these animals, as our actions threaten their habitats and wellbeing.
You may think that you are only one person, but your choices can make a massive difference to your local wildlife. From volunteering, participating in community cleanups, or carefully picking your consumer goods, here are some of the best ways to help animals live better today.
1. Adapt Your Garden to Be Wildlife Friendly
You can make your garden wildlife friendly by providing animals shelter, food, and a place to raise their family. Plant colorful, pet-friendly flowers to create a wildlife habitat. Learn which native plant species are best suited to your area to help attract wild birds, butterflies, and moths. And encourage the survival of monarch butterflies by planting native milkweed.
Replace lawns with native plants or garden beds, as lawns offer minimal animal shelter. Even if you don’t have a garden, you can still provide an inviting habitat for the local wildlife by creating a container garden on your patio or balcony.
While it’s tempting to clean up leaf falls and dead flower heads to keep your garden neat and tidy, you’re removing a critical food and shelter source that can benefit birds, bees, butterflies, and insects during the winter months. In addition, avoid using chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides as they cause the greatest number of wildlife poisonings and threaten your companion animals.
2. Keep Your Community Clean
It’s not just your garden that you can make wildlife-friendly; you can also help the local environment. One of the best ways to do this is to embark on regular litter-picking trips to remove rubbish that could harm animals. Not only does this make your local area more animal friendly, but it also helps protect the planet.
Volunteer your time to help clean up a local preserve or park. Many hold clean-up events like Yosemite National Park’s annual facelift. In a single clean-up day, more than 22,000 lbs of trash can be removed, which is highly beneficial to the local wildlife. If the local parks don’t have planned events, try setting up your own to encourage your local community to get involved with the project.
3. Support Your Local Animal Charities and Shelters
Reputable animal charities and shelters work hard to improve the lives of all animals and provide food and shelter to creatures in need. And there are numerous ways that you can help these organizations in their mission.
Volunteer your time at a local shelter or foster animals until they find their forever home. If you can, adopt animals from your local shelter to provide them with a better life – even if you don’t have the right resources and environment, encourage your family and friends to adopt instead. Donate a one-time gift or set up a monthly payment to support the work of these organizations and subscribe to their email or text updates to find out how you can help.
Donate used goods to animal charities so they can sell them and raise funds to continue their work or set up an event to raise money. Set up a World Spay Day event to help reduce the number of unwanted cats and share social media posts to help raise awareness of important issues.
4. Educate Yourself and Others
If we want to help animals live better lives, we need to learn how to help them lead better lives. Start by reading articles like this one, watching documentaries, and visiting ethical animal sanctuaries to learn about the needs of animals and what you can do to help.
Take action to help animals in your state and community by attending town meetings and calling your elected officials. Find your representative and ask them how you can support pending animal legislation. And familiarise yourself with legislative jargon to know the key talking points for these issues.
5. Be Smart With Your Shopping
Many animals – such as lab mice – undergo vigorous testing, which is often distressing, painful, and can cause lasting harm. Why? To test the suitability of new cosmetic items such as moisturizers, makeup, and other skin care items.
The best way to help end the suffering of animal testing is to shop for products that are not tested on animals. Look for Leaping Bunny-certified products and those with the PETA stamp of approval. Not all packaging has these stamps due to cost or space, so you can also check your favorite products on these databases:
In addition, palm oil is one of the leading contributors to deforestation in some of the most biodiversity forests in the world. But its versatile nature means it’s in as many as 50% of supermarket goods. Still, the problem with the palm oil industry is that it threatens the habitats of a wide range of animals, including endangered species such as the Sumatran rhino, orangutan, and pygmy elephants. Shopping for Palm-oil-free products helps protect these vulnerable creatures’ homes and reduces the amount of carbon contributing to climate change.
6. Eat With a Conscience
The best way to help prevent cruel animal farming practices is to live a vegan lifestyle. But if you don’t want to eliminate meat from your diet, you can still do several things to support the welfare of farm animals.
Limit the amount of meat, eggs, and dairy you consume. Over nine billion land animals in the USA alone are slaughtered yearly for food. And because of this high demand, less than 1% of these animals are raised on appropriate pastures where they have fresh air, space to roam, enrichment, and the chance to interact with other members of their species.
If we want to give farmyard animals a better life, we need to consume less meat, but this doesn’t need to be a drastic change to your diet. Reducing portion sizes, eliminating meat from one meal per day, or engaging in meat-free Mondays are great ways to make a difference.
If you want to make better choices, shop at farmer’s markets or direct from your local farm. You can also talk to your local supermarket about stocking free-range, factory-free foods and encourage them to source products that meet animal welfare standards.
