To honor National Teachers’ Day, we want to highlight the educators actively participating in compassionate environmental and wildlife education. By choosing not to keep live exotic classroom pets, abstaining from visiting exploitative captive facilities like zoos and aquariums for field trips, and refusing to allow mobile petting zoos to visit school campuses, teachers model crucial values for future generations like empathy, respect, and stewardship. At the same time, students learn more accurate information about wild animals and their habitats when they are not forced to observe them in unnatural captive environments or while demonstrating abnormal behaviors due to chronic stress or boredom.
Born Free USA Partners with ZooDraws to Illustrate the Life of Freeman the Monkey
To help support elementary educators in this goal, Born Free USA created an entirely free virtual classroom monkey adoption program, which features a real monkey — named Freeman — who lives at our primate sanctuary in south Texas and was rescued from the cruel primate pet trade over ten years ago. The program, which features six lesson plans complete with discussion questions and activities, is accessible via the online teaching platform Teachable and adaptable for most elementary ages.
We collaborated with viral artist Brian Ahearn, creator of Zoodraws, to bring Freeman’s story to life. Zoodraws is a wildlife comic series that combines science, humor, and conservation messaging. With the addition of Brian’s comic frames illustrating each chapter of Freeman’s journey, enrollments of our virtual adoption program will have access to twenty vibrant illustrations to keep students emotionally engaged with the material throughout each lesson. Soon, we will also create a standalone electronic comic book with Brian’s illustrations that can be used as a separate resource to accompany the adoption program and be printed for physical use in the classroom.
Brian is a lifelong wildlife enthusiast and trained illustrator with a degree in graphic design. Today, his work reaches more than 100,000 followers and over a million readers each month. He has collaborated with organizations including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Humane World for Animals, and Homegrown National Park, and previously worked with Born Free USA on a project exploring the harm wild animals experience in the pet trade in addition to our recently launched virtual adoption program.
Teaching Compassion in the Classroom
Despite claims from teachers suggesting that classroom pets and other live wild animals improve students’ learning, studies have found no significant difference in students’ academic achievements between groups involving live animals versus groups that incorporated a video lesson with animals. Thus, replacing live animals with other educational resources is an appropriate, useful, and compassionate pedagogical choice to help reduce the number of animals suffering in the name of “education.”
In addition to our virtual monkey adoption program, other effective methods of teaching students about biology while supporting animal welfare include: responsible companion animal show-and-tell or story time, symbolically “adopting” an animal from a GFAS-accredited sanctuary, live-streaming animals at accredited sanctuaries, creating a pollinator garden with native plants to attract local wildlife, viewing wildlife documentaries, storytelling using the case study of one animal or animal family unit in the wild (or perhaps one that was rescued from an exploitative captive environment), going on a field trip to a local wildlife rehabilitation/rescue center/accredited sanctuary, and going outside on field trips to local parks to focus on native flora and fauna to learn about their individual roles in the ecosystem.
Access Our Classroom Pets Resources
- Click here to access our virtual classroom monkey adoption program for FREE and become part of an important movement in education that helps instill concepts like compassion for nature, empathy for wildlife, and curiosity about the natural world within our younger generations today!
- Click here to learn more about compassionate teaching alternatives that help save thousands of wild animals from suffering in classrooms and other environments under the false name of “education” with our 2025 report Teacher’s Pets: The Exploitation of Wild Animals in the classroom.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Devan
Dear Reader,
We are a nonprofit committed to wildlife conservation, welfare, and rescue. Making resources free and widely distributed, like our news items, is an important part of our mission. If you found this article helpful, enjoyable, or enlightening, please donate to help keep these resources available, and Keep Wildlife In The Wild.
Thank You,
The Born Free USA Team
Dear Reader,