This website live streams animal shelters, helps you donate too

When you’re caught up in your daily life, it can be hard to find time to give back to your community. Things like grocery shopping will always feel more pressing than walking dogs at a faraway animal shelter. Animals Life NET is a website that understands this, and wants to make helping homeless animals easier so that you can give back quickly and simply.

The site offers users free live streams from shelters all around the world, with links on the side to feed the animals, volunteer at the shelter, help a crowdfunding campaign or even adopt a pet. If you’re looking to volunteer or adopt, the site puts you in direct contact with the shelter without needing to leave the site.

But there’s no contact needed to feed the animals. All shopping for a shelter of your choice can be done on Animals Life NET, and once the purchase is made, the site does everything for you.

The money is sent off to a local pet food supplier, who then delivers the food to the shelter. The shelter sends through proof of delivery to the site, who then forwards the proof on to you.

Anton Mironov, Animals Life NET’s digital marketing manager, says that transparency is something the company is very invested in.

Animals Life NET offers users free live streams from animal shelters all around the world, with links on the side to feed the animals

“The project started in Latvia, where animal welfare is a big issue. Most animal shelters could not attract much help, because people generally would not trust them with their money,” he writes in an email. “Since streaming has been an increasing trend for quite some time, we decided to combine the two — provide live streams for attraction, entertainment and elimination of trust issues, while also leading people to help shelters online, without having to donate money directly to shelters.”

There are currently 50 shelters listed on the site, 36 of which have live streams set up. The majority of them are from eastern Europe, but the site features shelters from every continent bar Australia. South Africa has two (one in Midrand, and one just outside Cape Town), and other countries involved include Nigeria, Colombia, Mexico, Vietnam, and Kazakhstan.

If you don’t have a lot of extra cash to spare, Animals Life NET has partnered with the likes of Amazon and AliExpress, meaning that when you access those sites via the site’s Shop with Us page, some proceeds from your purchase (of any product) will be donated to shelters and the site itself.

“We receive 8% from every purchase made on these websites, following our link,” Mironov writes. “Half of that goes to us and the other half goes to purchasing food and supplies for pets in one of the shelters.”

Animals Life NET is fairly straightforward and user-friendly, but you may hit an obstacle when browsing products, as all prices are listed in euros, despite your or the shelter’s location.

“We are working on enabling different currencies to be used for people in different countries,” Mironov tells us. “This is, by far, one of the biggest challenges that we have faced, but we are determined to fix it for the more convenient use of the website.”

Another challenge has been operating in countries that don’t have their own pet food suppliers. Mironov describes how countries like Macedonia and Vietnam have required Animals Life NET to import food from neighbouring countries.

Despite these challenges, the company estimates that about 5 tons of food was donated through its site in March 2017 — and that’s discounting the toys and litter filler donated.

The project is continually expanding, and welcomes all shelters who wish to join the organisation.