Livestreamed Animal Sanctuaries Can Turn Online Audiences Into Conservationists

Maya Higa describes Alveus Sanctuary as a way to reach people with conservation education where they already spend time: online. Her stated mission is “to use the internet to build our next generation of conservationists,” and the model she built around that mission is deliberately unlike a conventional public-facing zoo or sanctuary.

The core design is simple. Alveus rescues animals, builds large enclosures, and livestreams education programs and animal cameras online. The animals can become accessible to millions without meeting those viewers in person. Higa says this can scale beyond classroom outreach, while also reducing stress for the animals and expanding access for the public. Because Alveus is not open to visitors, the sanctuary does not have to manage the unpredictable stressors that come with people walking through animal spaces. It also avoids spending money on guest-facing infrastructure such as gift shops, concession stands and parking lots.

The result, as Higa describes it, is “one of the most accessible zoo models in the world”: anyone with an internet connection can visit for free, from anywhere. The sanctuary now has 36 cameras livestreaming animals 24 hours a day. Higa showed a collage of viewers watching from countries including Poland, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Algeria and Hong Kong.

That access is central to the conservation argument. Higa says Alveus’s online community is mostly 17 to 28 years old — “our nation’s new voters, new consumers, and up-and-coming decision makers.” Many of them did not arrive with a prior interest in environmentalism. They were ordinary internet users who encountered Alveus through feeds they were already scrolling.

Higa’s model began with a smaller and less planned experiment. She grew up on a farm, loved animals, worked as a zookeeper at 18 while in college, and brought animals such as kangaroos and lemurs to schools and birthday parties for wildlife education. Around the same time, she discovered Twitch through friends who livestreamed video games. She began streaming almost daily to about 10 viewers, doing ordinary livestream activities such as singing, cooking and talking.

The turning point was a red-tailed hawk named Bean. A zookeeper friend called Higa after the hawk had been hit by a car and needed help. Higa brought Bean to her college house and began rehabilitating him in her backyard. One night, while livestreaming and cooking, she mentioned the hawk. A viewer did not believe she had a bird in the backyard, so Higa put on a falconry glove and brought Bean inside on stream.

Someone watching clipped the moment and shared it on Reddit. It went viral. Higa’s audience grew overnight, and she began livestreaming Bean’s rehabilitation. She would call him from his perch to her glove while viewers watched his progress. Her key observation was that the audience did not merely consume the story. They became invested in Bean’s recovery “as if they were doing it with me, sort of.”

That pattern became the template: an individual animal, a live process, and viewers who develop emotional commitment through repeated exposure. The zoo where Higa worked began allowing her to bring animals such as cockatoos and reptiles home for livestream presentations. What had been an outreach job reaching roughly 20 children in a classroom became, in her words, a work-from-home version reaching thousands of people around the world.

“Instead of reaching 20 kids at a time in a classroom, I was reaching thousands of people at a time all over the world,” Higa says.

At 22, Higa decided to build the concept at sanctuary scale: an animal sanctuary that “nobody visits,” at least not in person.

Higa says the initial capital for Alveus came from a single livestream. During a broadcast, someone in chat asked whether she would shave her head on stream if viewers raised $500,000. She agreed. Over a 21-hour livestream, the audience raised $573,000 to build the sanctuary. Higa used the funds to buy land in Austin, Texas, and begin constructing animal enclosures.

The same internet-native mechanics continue inside the sanctuary’s operations. Winnie the Moo, a cow rescued from a beef operation in Oklahoma, is part of Alveus’s education around commercial agriculture, animal welfare and environmental impact. Viewers can make a five-dollar online donation that triggers an automated feeder to dispense treats for Winnie. Higa showed the feeder on a live pasture camera as Winnie ate from it, and says that single feeder has generated more than $38,000 for the sanctuary.

The examples Higa gives are not presented as gimmicks separated from conservation. They are the mechanism by which attention becomes participation, and participation becomes funding. Appa and Momo, two marmosets originally purchased online as pets and later brought to Alveus after years of inadequate care, now support education about primate exploitation in the pet trade and rainforest habitat conservation. Higa showed them on a live camera inside a wooden enclosure, looking at a small tablet screen that displayed game options. Finn, an American red fox confiscated from the illegal pet trade in California, lives with his best friend Reed and is used to teach viewers about the fur trade and “build a new generation of fur-free consumers.”

The animals are not generic mascots in Higa’s account. Each resident is tied to a larger human-caused pressure: exotic pet ownership, fur, commercial agriculture, habitat loss. The livestream gives viewers repeated access to individual animals; the educational programming connects those individuals to systems.

Higa reports that since 2019, livestreaming has helped her raise more than $7.5 million for conservation causes worldwide. In 2025 alone, she says Alveus reached more than 250 million people with conservation education online — a figure she compares to more than 10 million classrooms like the ones she visited as a college zookeeper. On screen, TED displayed the number “250,000,000” over a mosaic of small video-feed images.

Her argument depends on a shift in who gets to imagine themselves as a conservationist. Higa names Steve Irwin, David Attenborough and Jane Goodall as personal heroes and as examples of conservation figures established through television programming. But she says figures that legendary can also make the work feel distant, like something only exceptional people achieve.

Alveus is meant to collapse that distance. For its viewers, Higa says, the sanctuary is not a remote institution or a polished television program. It is something one of them built from within a platform culture they already understand, and they can participate in it live. That does not make the work smaller in ambition; it changes the route by which young people encounter it. Rather than requiring prior commitment to environmentalism, Alveus tries to make conservation appear inside the ordinary flow of social media.

The next phase Higa describes is an extension of the same logic from rescued resident animals to wild recovery. Alveus is building a new facility to breed endangered species for reintroduction and release. She says the sanctuary is starting with the recovery of critically endangered wolves. The hope is that viewers will form attachments to individual wolves in the same way they attached to Bean, and that this attachment will expand into concern for the wild places where those animals are returned.

Higa’s final claim is clear: millions of new conservationists could be built from home, through sustained contact with individual animals and the ecosystems they represent. “I think it’s working,” she says.