Life and work on the finca with rescue animals
We get asked regularly what it is like to live and work on the finca with rescue animals — what happens behind the scenes, how our day-to-day lives are?
Living and working with rescue animals isn’t the most glamorous job, but we love it. We try the best we can to portray our unusual lifestyle as honestly and openly as possible on our various social media platforms. Our team writes blogs such as this one on our website, regularly updates with photos on Instagram, news and stories on Facebook, and little silly or cute videos on TikTok. Even with all that, we still don’t manage to show you everything.
Our finca has a very unique lifestyle for the running of Tenerife Animal Sanctuary. With our donation/waste food run, community-style living, and our 250+ animals all together on our sustainable, self-built finca — we somehow manage to create a chaotic yet peaceful sanctuary that continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with an amazing daily team.
What really happens here?
For a regular follower who might see the updates of new horse arrivals or cute videos of kittens — or even donate on one of our fundraisers — they still might not know exactly where their hard-earned money is going. We want to show this in our new Finca Life YouTube series! We will make weekly episodes about what we’re doing now, where we will go next, how the whole idea started, how we got this far, who we are, and why we chose Tenerife.
We want to show you everything
Like how we manage to run this place and take care of so many animals on such a small budget. How we’ve managed to build so much so quickly using only recycled materials. How we come to get hold of new animals and the progress of our current animals. We even want to show you our fails — like when we trusted the wrong person at the beginning, which cost us a lot of money and left us with problems (one of which could have potentially blown up part of our finca!).
There was also the time we got denounced for stealing and threatened with a “gun” when in fact we were just clearing rubbish for a neighbouring old man — and our getaway vehicle (a horse box) was mistaken for a blue van. Or when we built an amazing roof for our community area, only to find out it was too tall and blocked the sea view from the Yurt, so we had to start again! We live and learn, and we’ve made many, many mistakes along the way. Remember, this is new to us as well.
Big team of volunteers
Fortunately, our positives outweigh the negatives on a daily basis. Most of our videos show the day-to-day function and growth of the finca, the animals, and the people who make it all possible. Our great group of volunteers — who sadly on occasion get titled as “hippies and bums” — work incredibly hard on their specific tasks: the small animal team (cleaning, feeding, etc.), the horse team (training, rehab, medical care), the builders, gardeners, computer team, chef, donation collectors, and more. Everyone has a particular role in how the finca runs, each as important and inspiring as the other.
One morning last week, while our admin team (Manon, Katrin, Inge, and myself) were all inside the office/my bedroom/kitchen/house, my parents popped by to visit. After arriving on the island two days before — plenty of time during UK lockdown to get lost in YouTube channels — they had lots of ideas and enthusiasm.
How we came upon the YouTube series idea
After having a chat all together, we came up with this amazing YouTube series idea. One of our “horse girls,” Manon, luckily for us also has a keen interest in filming. So she has been making films on each horse and rescue animal to update our Patreon and Facebook followers. We hadn’t, however, thought of taking it that step further and making a YouTube series.
After watching a few episodes of my dad’s recommended channels to get ideas, we all agreed we should give it a go. Now, a point to remember: we are not professionals. We do not have funding for our videos (we don’t even have funding for our sanctuary). We also do not have time for scripting, planning, or fancy editing. So maybe we can’t offer a top cinematic experience (yet), but what we will provide is honesty — behind the scenes, real life, real blood, sweat, and tears. Real rescue stories, real animals, real rehab stories, and real people.
Subscribe and follow our rescue animals
We welcome you all to subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to check out some of our old videos, you’re very welcome — but hold on tight, because within the next 2–3 weeks we plan to launch our first episode: “Finca Life – Who Are We?” Meet us and let us show you around the finca. We’ll give you a little background on how we got this far and show you the projects we’re currently working on. Each weekly episode will be full of hard work, struggles, love, cute animals, and just the right amount of comedy to welcome you into our “finca fam.”
Here is a recent upload we did just to familiarise ourselves with YouTube — but it’s certainly worth a watch!
“So maybe we can not offer a top cinematic experience (yet) but what we will provide is honesty, behind the scenes, real life, real blood, sweat and tears. Real rescue stories, real animals, real rehab stories along with real people.”
