News & Updates

‘These creatures are iconic and very precious. They’re the only ones we’ve got’ - John Cleese Legendary comedian, actor, writer, film producer and passionate conservationist, John Cleese, has sent a stark video message to delegates at the United Nations wildlife trade conference, CITES CoP17, which is taking place in Johannesburg, South Africa:

Regulations just published by the Norwegian government will effectively bring an end to the use of wild animals in circuses in Norway when they are implemented in January 2017. The Born Free Foundation has welcomed the news, which follows a series of false starts, whereby bans were mooted but fell by the wayside.

Born Free has welcomed a motion passed at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) World Conservation Congress encouraging governments globally to close their domestic markets for elephant ivory as a matter of urgency.

Born Free has today welcomed the findings of new genetic analysis published in the journal Current Biology that has unexpectedly found giraffes are not one species, but four.

On Sunday 4th September, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced that it had placed the Eastern Lowland Gorilla in its ‘Critically Endangered’ Red List category, meaning that the species faces an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild. This is the highest category of risk. The next category is ‘Extinct’.

Latest report confirms Born Free’s prediction - that Africa’s elephants are in a ‘devastating spiral of decline’. International wildlife charity, Born Free Foundation, has described the transcontinental figures released yesterday on savannah elephants as “profoundly sobering”.

Research published this week in the journal Vaccine reports field trials of the oral vaccine SAG2 in Ethiopian wolves, Africa’s most threatened carnivore and the world’s rarest canid.

Born Free Foundation and The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust call for ban on controversial use of the ankus in UK zoos. Two of the world’s leading animal protection charities, the Born Free Foundation and The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, have joined forces to call for an urgent review of the use of bullhooks (sticks with curved, pointed tips, often known as ‘ankuses’) in elephant handling and ask that standard management practice include the use of protective barriers to ensure the welfare and safety of both keepers and elephants across all UK zoos.

Leading animal welfare and wildlife conservation charity the Born Free Foundation has launched a unique new animal adoption to help protect the world’s most illegally-traded mammal, the pangolin. Pangolin populations are declining rapidly, with one million believed to have been taken from the wild in a recent 10 year period.

This year Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary, located on Ngamba Island within Lake Victoria, has been tackling the effects of a significant water level rise which has been washing away jetties and threatening infrastructure.