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Citizen Zoo Is Rewilding the UK, One Grasshopper at a Time

The London-based social enterprise is turning regular people into at-home zookeepers.

When not tasking volunteers with hand-rearing animals, Citizen Zoo gets them involved in upgrading habitats, such as in its Get inVOLEd project, which aims to bring back endangered water voles—the UK’s fastest declining wild mammal—to Kingston’s Hogsmill River. Citizen Zoo launched in 2016 as a standard-bearer for rewilding after Ruzo had seen conventional wildlife charities’ lukewarm embrace of the idea while studying for a masters in conservation science at Imperial College London, following a degree in zoology. In Portugal, his family built an aviary full of parrots and other birds that he and his grandmother found in the local vivid wildlife markets, which Ruzo later learned had likely been illegally trafficked from Southern Africa and South America.

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