Our Team
Vonne Apsey
Vonne has pursued formal studies with world leaders in animal wellbeing related subjects over the years and has a diploma in Animal Behavioural Science (COAPE SA). She has a diploma in Animal Sensory Enrichment and a diploma in Healing and Communication (both from HAO UK), as well as further certifications in Zoopharmacognosy (IMIM UK).
But the real magic comes from more than twenty years of working with a magnificent array of animals in various captive environments, from penguins in a world-class aquarium to pumas in a bare-bones Amazonian NGO, and observing opportunities for better care within each of these environments.
With her varied basket of tools, a deep commitment to her work and inherent values of respect, humanity and action, Vonne founded the Captive Animal Enrichment Project in 2024 to answer the persistent call to profoundly enrich the lives of animals living in captivity.
Zani Botes
Zani owns a data-driven digital marketing company (Mobimeme) with a career that stretches back for over 24 years. She’s been yearning to channel her talents into a worthy non-profit cause and jumped at the opportunity to work with CAEP.
Zani loves to share ethical awareness of animal subjects to a broad digital audience and strives to spread the good news and stories of how the Captive Animal Enrichment Project changes the lives of animals in captivity. She also manages fundraising events and develops best practices and guidelines to help maximise CAEP’s fundraising efforts.
She brings an outside perspective and commercial guidance to our organisation, but there is nothing that Zani won’t do to help out.
Lauren Jonson
Lauren brings over 17 years of expertise in digital media to our board of directors, most recently as Head of Media at a Cape Town-based agency. She has honed a deep understanding of media dynamics and strategic campaign management.
Lauren is an ardent animal welfare advocate and volunteers her expertise to an under-resourced dog rescue centre in her community where she is involved in fundraising efforts. Behind the scenes she ensures the organisations’ financial health by tackling essential but unglamorous tasks associated with the tax system. She is an earth-friendly advocate and proud guardian to two brown dogs.
Lauren’s blend of leadership and commitment makes her crucial to the growth of The Captive Animal Project.
Our Purpose
The establishment of CAEP is motivated by an awareness of the conditions and limitations of many ethical captive animal environments, and an ability to make a strong contribution to improve the quality of life for animals living in captive environments. We respect and honour the facilities and people who work hard to provide for the primary needs of captive animals, those of shelter, food and access to medical attention.
CAEP works to address and introduce strategies to support the more complex needs of animals, we help them to achieve more balanced physiological and emotional states, and give them familiar ways to cope better with their unnatural surroundings and the resulting negative effects of these on them, using only entirely natural processes.
We cannot give them freedom, but we can give them freedom of choice!
Our Approach
All animals in captivity are living in unnatural environments. We aim to ‘bring the outdoors indoors’, giving captive animals opportunities to engage in the positive, natural behaviour of self-selection and by doing so, improving the quality of life for as many individual animals as possible.
We are committed to ethical practices, rigorous scientific research, and collaboration with passionate animal care professionals. We source materials locally or through local suppliers wherever possible and ensure that the highest quality organic materials are used for highest potency and maximum positive effects for the animals.
We do this by:
- Actively engaging with the systems of animal welfare and, through the example of our work, supporting the expansion of the care we give animals in captivity to include their deeper needs;
- Raising awareness amongst people working at captive facilities as to how to support the animals within their care using Applied Zoopharmacognosy and sensory enrichment;
- Empowering these people to be conduits for healing animals by allowing them to engage with medicinal plant materials and learn how these can be used;
- Introducing and facilitating a symbiotic, multi-directional healing model that benefits both animals and the people who care for them, opposing the one-directional norm that has proven limited in its sustained positive impact on the animals; and
- Actively addressing the plague of compassion fatigue amongst people working in these facilities by offering them new ways to take better care of the animals under their guardianship and showing them animals whose states are unmistakably alleviated through our work.
Who we work with
CAEP works closely with under-resourced facilities that qualify to receive our assistance through strict vetting processes, ensuring ethical alignment with our ideals and theirs. Our fundamental commitment is to work with those whose philosophies, like ours, are to do no harm; and whose interests, like ours, are to radically uplift the lives of animals living in captivity. We work very hard to raise funds for our cause, and just as hard to ensure that these are directed to honourable recipients.
We are collaborative companions to ethical animal caregivers and facilities.
We are grateful for contributions from companies and individuals who support animal-based corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. These proceeds are used to improve the quality and availability of healing natural materials provided to captive animals. They need us and we need you.
“What is mankind without the animals? If all the animals were gone, people would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For what happens to the animals, soon happens to mankind. All things are connected.”
Chief Seattle, Squamish Tribe
