Animal Chronicles
Dr. Eddie, Dr. Dog & The Moon Bears
by John Thompson
One day several years ago, Jill Robinson walked into the live animal market in Guangzhou, China, and bought a small white dog. At that moment, the scruffy little guy went from being someone’s next dinner to a celebrity known as Dr. Eddie. And the media watched, recorded and reported on this compassionate woman’s display of opposition to the live animal trade in China.
Dr. Eddie joins a troupe of similar rescues, the “Dr. Dogs” who now take their cold noses and happy dispositions to people in nursing homes, hospitals and other places where a ray of animal sunshine might brighten someone’s day.
Symptomatic of a changing feeling about four-legged companions in China, the Dr. Dog animal-assisted therapy program is hailed by Chinese medical scientists as an excellent therapeutic tool that helps boost morale and promotes healing. And people do smile when they encounter these ambassadors of kindness.
Jill founded Animals Asia, best known for its China Bear Rescue project, in 1998. She did this because of her visit a few years prior to one of the several hundred farms that keep Moon Bears, named for the white crescent on their chest. These bears are milked of their bile, which is extracted and sold for many uses, including traditional Chinese medicine.
Slipping away from the organized group with which she arrived, Jill explored the facility and found a darkened cellar filled with tiny cages, each containing a bear.
A message from a bear
“The room was really dark and I couldn’t see well,” she recalls, “but when I walked up to these cages, I heard these strange popping vocalizations coming from the animals. I realized that it was my presence that was having this effect on the bears. When I got close enough to see inside the cages, it was like a horror story unfolding. A catalog of injuries all over their bodies. And then these grotesque seven-inch catheters jutting out from their abdomens. So it was obvious why they were afraid. The very presence of a human was causing them distress.
“Being a bit disoriented, I backed against a cage and felt something brush against my shoulder. I spun around to see a female bear with her paw stretched through the bars. At that time, I didn’t know better and it seemed a very natural thing to reach out my hand to her. She took it and gently squeezed my fingers. It touched me so deeply at the time, and as I thought back, asking myself why this tortured bear didn’t hurt me, I realized the great significance. A message had passed between us. I know that now.”
Although Jill never saw her again, she named her “Hong,” which means “bear” in Cantonese. And Hong was the inspiration for Jill’s China bear rescue project, which has experienced some startling successes.
The organization’s primary goal is to end bear farming entirely. In 2000, after seven years of negotiations, the Chinese government signed an unprecedented agreement of partnership with Animals Asia to begin the rescue of bears from bile farms. The Animals Asia sanctuary in Chengdu, China, currently holds 205 of these beautiful, intelligent, fun-loving creatures, all now able to stretch their limbs and walk and play. But there is also resistance to closing down an industry that has sustained several hundred farmers for many years. Jill remains hopeful.
“We have open days at the sanctuary where thousands of people come each year just to enjoy and laugh and respect these animals as we do,” she says. “They fall in love with the bears and go away with a passion to tell their friends and write essays for the newspapers about their experiences at the sanctuary. We have an education facility now where people can see the ‘crush cages,’ the full metal jackets that some bears wore on the farms that would cut into their bodies, and the catheters. People are shocked to the core.”
Jill feels that there is great empathy for animals among Chinese people. “Many people care as passionately as anyone in the West. We have public demonstrations now in the streets. In communist China, this would never have happened. But the government is relaxing regulations where we’re concerned. They’re allowing us to do this.”
Animals Asia has advertising campaigns, billboards, even publicity displays in department stores where the reality of bear farming is shown. “We do presentations to universities across China and the students are just fantastic. You look around the audience and see kids of 18 and 20 just visibly shocked and crying about what is happening to animals in their own country.”
Friends, not food or fur
Jill’s work with dogs and cats does not involve keeping a shelter. She believes her efforts are better spent addressing the bigger picture of educating people, or rather, allowing their innate compassion to unfold — and in lobbying the government on the issue of dogs and cats being “friends, not food.” In that view, she is supported by the increasing number of Chinese families that are keeping dogs and cats as pets. “There is actually a pet boom in China right now,” she says.
As an extension of the Dr. Dog program, Animals Asia has launched “Professor Paws Pet Cadet” program, in which dogs are specially trained to make visits to chools and housing units. They emphasize the “dogs as friends” concept, teaching people not to fear dogs, and that dogs are not the disease-carrying creatures many have been raised to believe. Many children are getting their first chance to touch a dog through this remarkable outreach program.
But there is a huge resistance to legislative and cultural change from the businesses that profit from trading in dogs and cats. Restaurants that serve dog meat present their cuisine as beneficial for human health. “You couldn’t have two more conflicting views if you tried,” Jill observes. And dog and cat fur sold to clothing manufacturers is a big business, with the fur often reaching U.S. stores labeled as something else.
The tens of millions of dogs and cats sold each year at the live animal markets to become food for humans suffer slow and cruel deaths in the cultural belief that “torture equals taste.”
“One thing that really concerns me,” says Jill, “is the call we see, largely from Western groups, for humane slaughter of dogs and cats (rather than putting an end to their consumption). They say, ‘Well, we have to respect the culture of another country.’ But that is utterly and completely not okay.”
As the Animals Asia Web site explains: “In a country where no animal welfare legislation exists, and veterinary standards sadly lag behind many other countries, the words and practices of so-called ‘humane slaughter’ would, in reality, mean little to the dogs and cats.”
Jill is also fearful that as industrial farming of dogs and cats takes further hold in China, the slaughter of these animals for food will hide behind closed doors, as has occurred with factory farming in the United States. Cloaked in secrecy and disinformation, these “invisible” businesses do their brutal work undisturbed by significant public outcry.
What stops this trailblazer from getting discouraged? “Always, always, the animals themselves,” she says. “Remember what Napoleon said of China a long time ago: ‘There lies a sleeping giant. Let her sleep. If she wakes, she will shake the world.’ And he was right. China is waking up now, and so are people who laugh and are motivated by animals. We are just not doing enough, honestly, we aren’t, and that is the frustration. The suffering needs to stop now.”
In 2005, Jill Robinson received the Marin Humane Society’s Humanitarian of the Year Award. Learn more about Animals Asia at www.animalsasia.org.
