I'm a huge animal lover. I have two cats at home (unfortunately only two - it's a small house), pet every animal I see in the streets, do a volunteering job on a little farm in the city and donate to several kinds of animal welfare organizations. When I am travelling to other countries I want to see cities, culture, and nature. To explore a country I use recommendations of friends, online blogs and sites as TripAdvisor. When it comes to visiting a building, doing a boat trip or renting a bike for example, this works absolutely well. But when it comes to activities where animals could be or are involved it is hard to find in one overview whether or not an activity is good to go to. At least, for someone which cares about animals the way I do.

When I was on a holiday in Sri Lanka we we're about to go on a trip to Udawalawe National Park. Our travel guide suggested we could also visit a place with elephants. Baby elephants to be more precise. Alarm bells. Baby elephants' were they captured? Why would they be in that place? Would visitors be able to be in direct contact with them? I googled and strutted upon a few alarming websites and reviews about a certain elephant orphanage. I took me over an hour to go through all the reviews, double check on Google and TripAdvisor. Although some reviews were like "nice place, lovely elephants" and "OMG we were allowed to wash the elephant!" I also read alarming reviews like "the elephants keep shaking there heads and look sad" and "the elephants were tied in the river and were beaten with sticks". For me this was a place not good to go to and I felt sorry for the elephants. Instead we went to a place where injured and abandoned elephants were fed three times a day, which I also checked through various websites. Visitors were able to watch from quite a distance and needed to be quiet. No direct contact with the elephants. No commercial interest of the organization. The elephants just came to eat and took off afterwards. Took about 30 minutes. I felt way more relaxed there and was happy to see the elephants just lived their lives, seemed healthy and happy (as far as I'm able to judge of course) and the visitors respected this way of seeing these great creatures in their own environment. But that evening I started thinking about this experience, from exploring online (many hours, various website and opposite opinions) to booking and going there.

Along with me, many others care for animals. We want to visit counties around the world and explore and experience nature, but with the interest of animals in our minds and at our hearts. That's why we need one source of information about animal involved activities to being able to make the right choice.

And maybe, if we improve knowledge and awareness around this topic, the amount of animal unfriendly activities will decrease eventually, so less animals around the world need to suffer under animal unfriendly human involvement.