Empowering Communities Through Wildlife Education Programs  

The Belize Wildlife and Referral Clinic is expanding its impact beyond animal rescue with the launch of a new Wildlife and One Health Education Lab. The facility will host training, workshops and certification programs for everyone from police officers and tour guides to students and community groups. Clinic officials say education is key to reducing the human-wildlife conflicts that bring many injured animals through their doors each year. The new lab is also another step toward the clinic’s long-term goal of building a full wildlife hospital and rehabilitation center on its property.

 

Dr. Isabelle Paquet-Durand, Director, Belize Wildlife and Referral Clinic

“We officially celebrated the inauguration for our Wildlife and One Health Education Lab, and it’s an exciting new step because it will allow us to provide more education and outreach in our own building here. We have an outreach program that is going for almost eight years, and we go countrywide to do workshops, but with this new classroom facility here, we can provide this education on site. And while we are a wildlife clinic and we mostly receive injured and imperiled wildlife of all species, most of these species come to us because they had a conflict or an interaction with humans. So therefore, education is really the most important thing we do. Therefore, this building is very exciting to us to be officially open. We have started the outreach and capacity building effort in 2018 focusing foremost on enforcement, so a lot of police officers, other NGO partners, including the Belize Defense Force, we had several trainings as well. Now, over the years, we have reached out more and more to other groups of people from, tour guide workshops that we do because tour guides are on the front lines and see a lot of  wildlife in their work. We have reached out to scouts. Our trainees are getting younger and younger and with the latest grant that we just started actually this week, thanks to the Protected Areas Conservation Trust, we have added two new wildlife fellows to our team that stay with us for a year and  get training. So it goes from two-day trainings to these fellows now for an entire year.”

 

The new facility marks another milestone for the organization as it works toward completing a larger wildlife hospital and rehabilitation center on its own property.

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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