she smiled and said, “I’ll be on your committee. I’ll handle the money and accounting.”
The next morning at a beachside café, I met Bill Woolley and his fiancée, Lindi, by chance. I didn’t even have to show Lindi a photograph. She joined the party committee on the spot after hearing what I’d seen in Laos.
At the end of that first week, Taury Wainwright, a sweet-natured, beach-blonde girlfriend of one of Jon’s business partners, had also raised her hand to help. Taury, a decade younger than the rest of us, had many friends who were famous Australian footy players, and she promised to get a young, hip crowd to the party.
We decided to ask Ian Love, the owner of the popular restaurant CoCo’s, if he would host the party. Jon knew Ian and arranged a meeting, and Ian quickly agreed. He had two dogs and was an animal lover, and he threw in a substantial discount on food and drinks.
Miraculously, a team of bear warriors had materialized, all eager to end the suffering of five souls they’d never met.
Five months after the formation of the committee, the glamorous event and jewelry auction caused a frenzy of generous bidding that raised $17,500. Combined with the $6,000 I already had, the sum totaled the exact amount Victor had said we needed to build the sanctuary.
I could barely contain my excitement when I called Victor with the news. He had good news, too. His organization, WSPA, had given the nod to oversee construction of the sanctuary. In addition, he’d reached out to the Thai Society for the Conservation of Wild Animals (TSCWA) to see if it would assist with the project. Apparently, TSCWA had received many complaints about the neglected bears at the Vientiane National Ethnic Cultural Park. Not only were they willing to help us, but they offered to sterilize the bears and relocate them to the sanctuary once it was built.
Like an unstoppable wave, the movement to uncage Fri and the other bears was a powerful force of energy. Good was prevailing, and I was overwhelmed by the generosity of people from all parts of the world who were working to right this terrible wrong.
Mount Desert Island, Maine, USA
Approximately six hundred days after I met Fri, I received a large manila envelope in the mail. It was a letter from Victor, telling me the bears were finally home in their new sanctuary. The news was bittersweet. Two of the five had died while awaiting rescue.
I stuck my hand in the envelope and pulled out two photographs. One showed a medical team standing over sedated bears on stretchers. Another was a shot of a bear in a wooden crate being transported on the flatbed of a truck. Tears welled in my eyes as I studied the pictures and thought of the bears I hadn’t been able to save. As I reached for a tissue on my desk, a third photograph dropped from the envelope and to the floor. I picked it up and my spirit lifted. It was Fri — recognizable by his unique, broken half-moon chest marking. He was standing upright, rubbing his back on a tree. He was smiling.
When I first touched down in Laos nearly two years earlier, I’d been searching for justice and compassion for human beings. I left the country with something else: a clear understanding that all animals, human or otherwise, deserve life and are entitled to freedom. The experience was enlightening. I was shown that as difficult as it is to witness the cruelty that often comes with rescue, the reward in helping a defenseless soul is immeasurable.
The first bear sanctuary in Laos was built by WSPA, TSCWA, and more than a hundred people, primarily from the United States and Australia, who generously funded it. Today, the Laos Wildlife Rescue Center is home to twenty-four bears. It is operated by the Wildlife Friends Foundation (WFF), a Thailand-based charity founded by Edwin Wiek.
PORCUPINE, MONKEY, ELEPHANT, PTEROPOD
The Power of the Collective Voice
Perth, Australia
“Come and see dragons with me! I understand they’ve just eaten a Japanese tourist. Isn’t that wonderful?” Guy joked in his posh British accent. Guy was calling from Bali, Indonesia, and paused, presumably to take a drag from his ever-present cigarette. “If you come, I promise not to order suckling pig at any of the local establishments.”
I first met my most eccentric friend when he was Guy David Greville. Then he became Lord Brook, and he was now Guy Warwick, the Earl of Warwick. Behind the façade of his often sarcastic, sometimes shocking, but always witty repartee, he was a highly intelligent, deeply caring man whose friendship I cherished. While our views on animal welfare oftentimes differed, he supported my advocacy and had, more than once, let me use stays in his Spanish villa as an auction item to raise money for charities.
Guy was also one of Jon’s closest friends, and he wanted Jon and me to go on vacation with him and his partner, Natalie Bovill, to the island of Flores, Indonesia, where he was thinking of buying land. He was enticing me with the promise of seeing Komodo dragons.
I’d been intrigued by the giant lizard since reading the book Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine, about unique animals on the verge of extinction. Guy knew this, since we’d once seen a Komodo dragon together at a Balinese zoo, and indeed, I couldn’t resist the thought of seeing a “dragon” in the wild. Eight weeks later, in 2013, Jon and I met Guy and Natalie in Bali, where we boarded a small plane for the hour-long flight to Flores.
The entry to the island couldn’t have been more spectacular. As we flew over hundreds of uninhabited lush, green, volcanic islands, where high cliffs dropped to white beaches that bled into turquoise water, a calm washed over me.
Island of Flores, Indonesia
A smiling man with light brown skin and dressed in a khaki-colored uniform introduced himself as our driver and proceeded to take us on a twenty-minute, hold-on-to-someone-to-stay-upright bumpy ride to Jayakarta Suites, a four-star hotel on the southwestern tip of the island.
As we turned into the resort’s palm-lined drive, Guy exclaimed sarcastically, “Oh no! I’m afraid monkey is on the menu.” As we drove past a clump of metal cages, I looked back and noticed someone was chained to a tree.
“Is that a monkey?” I asked.
“Yes, and a menagerie of others are tucked away in the back garden,” Guy replied, then teased: “Apparently, I’ve chosen hotels badly. We’ve landed in the only one where they keep the meat on the premises.”
A few minutes later, while the others walked into the hotel, I went in the opposite direction.
I stopped near the monkey who was chained to the tree. Around his neck was a chain-link collar inside a clear plastic tube. His hand reached out to me and his mouth opened to speak, but he made no sound. He picked up a Kit Kat candy wrapper and showed it to me, pleading for another. I looked around for a caretaker. There was no one in sight.
The
