Little Kaya has to be one of the luckiest dogs on the planet. Senior Bear Manager Nic remembers the tiny, skeletal puppy that arrived with us on site at the bear sanctuary in Chengdu after she was picked up from the street.
News has come in from zoos in China that their captive animals reacted in various ways to last week’s solar eclipse. Elephants and giraffes apparently returned indoors, thinking it was night, and cranes and flamingos fell asleep before emerging again when it became light – starting the life of another day.
Marc Bekoff (our wonderful friend and renowned animal ethologist) and I attended and spoke at the Minding Animals Conference in Newcastle, near Sydney, Australia last week.
Husband and wife artists, Zeng Jianyong and Tianmu, have sent us their most beautiful paintings of bears as their generous gift to our Moon Bear Rescue campaign.
Being on swine flu lockdown at least had the upside of catching up on the backlog of emails, and enjoying the bears out in the sanctuary (once the authorities had released me from room to sanctuary quarantine).
At 3am on Wednesday, Heather our Senior Vet and Tina our translator came knocking at my door accompanied by two gowned and masked officials from China's health bureau.
Our fundraising roadshows are always super busy, but the buzz of meeting our wonderful support groups, old and new friends, and raising much-needed funds for the dogs, cats and bears of Asia makes them 100 per cent fun and worthwhile.
There are no words to express our sense of loss as once again I have to tell you of the death of one of our beautiful bears. Especially a bear like Haribo, whose determination to survive captured the hearts of all who had the privilege to know him.
With a heavy heart I'm afraid that the weekend has brought no positive news following the cruel slaughter of dogs in Shaanxi Province last week. Our good friend, Chinese animal welfarist Jianghong and her team have just returned from a traumatic trip to Hangzhong city and Yangxian. They saw no dogs alive in the streets of Yanxian - just the broken carcasses of innocent victims, and officials washing their hands of blood, and responsibility, for such a brutal knee jerk reaction to rabies.
Longtime supporters Kathy and Larry Schiller from Los Angeles have been superbly generous to the bears – and have surpassed themselves in their latest philanthropic gesture by selling one of their finest Chinese works of art to benefit our work. The auction at Christies in Hong Kong on Saturday 29th May saw the finest example from Zeng Fanzhi’s notorious “Mask” series going under the hammer for a princely sum, and Animals Asia receiving a phenomenal US$100,000 from the proceeds of the sale as a result.
Jill founded Animals Asia in 1998, after an encounter with a caged bear on a farm in China changed her life forever. She now heads a team of over 300 enthusiastic staff and divides her time between our bear rescue centres in China and Vietnam and our Hong Kong head office. She travels extensively to participate in conferences and speak at fundraising events.
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