With much pride it’s my very great pleasure to say a huge and heartfelt welcome to our new Italian office and staff. Dave Neale our UK Director flew over to Genoa recently to complete the final paperwork and welcome Ettore, Carmen, Leo, Irene and Antonello officially into the Animals Asia family.
I love reading the weekend reports when things are a little quieter and the person on duty can enjoy some well-deserved bear-watching as well as attending to the normal duties of the day. Here is a lovely addition to the brown bear’s antics by Hayley this weekend:
Wednesday 9.30am, and there we were at the window of Caesar's bunker waiting for the doors of her den to open into her brand new world. The enclosure looked superb. Our ex-Architect, Darren Seng, and Project Director Boris and his team had done a truly remarkable job in creating two appropriate areas which could both enrich and stimulate Caesar, Benji and Poupouce, and which could also provide an educational platform from which viewers could observe.
Tuesday was Senior Bear Manager Nic's birthday - and the day of the big move. Brown bear Caesar and Tibetan browns Benji and Poupouce were being prepared to be transferred into their new specially designed enclosures which would cater to their different characteristics, compared with the moon bear type enclosures where they currently live. Substantially larger than the Asiatic black bears, Caesar, Benji and Poupouce have a propensity for digging - especially in the colder weather. Caesar, as you may have read in a previous blog, was a master at this and dug for China, often proudly surveying her "den" after an afternoon's work, which would fit six grown men.
Tuesday was Senior Bear Manager Nic's birthday - and the day of the big move. Brown bear Caesar and Tibetan browns Benji and Poupouce were being prepared to be transferred into their new specially designed enclosures which would cater to their different characteristics, compared with the moon bear type enclosures where they currently live. Substantially larger than the Asiatic black bears, Caesar, Benji and Poupouce have a propensity for digging - especially in the colder weather. Caesar, as you may have read in a previous blog, was a master at this and dug for China, often proudly surveying her "den" after an afternoon's work, which would fit six grown men.
I’ll never forget filming dogs being slaughtered in a restaurant in Hanoi several years ago. For two long hours I silently cried on the inside, while making a pathetic attempt to look calm on the outside, so that the people slaughtering the dogs would really believe that I was writing a travel brochure on the delights of “exotic” food in Vietnam.
I was thrilled to see in Hong Kong's popular Sunday Morning Post today an article about our generous high-profile supporter Harriet Tung, who was on site for our latest rescue. You can read Harriet's frank interview here.
Our gorgeous Jen, who worked as our Vet in Vietnam, recently married her very own “Bear”.
Despite our new bears having better body condition than those we received last March, the emergency health-checks are showing all too clearly the problems that the bear farmers are attempting to disguise.
The air was full of anticipation and excitement – it always is when new bears arrive. First you feel elated that animals that have been slowly wasting away in cages, tortured by the extractors of their bile, will soon be released from their suffering. And then you feel sick to your stomach, knowing that the odds will be against some of them and they will arrive with us too late.
