Yesterday I arrived at the Peace River Refuge and Ranch (a wildlife sanctuary for animals abused by private owners, small non-AZA zoos, entertainment industry, and other horrors) around 11 a.m. and checked in made the suggested donation. They had a tent set up with tables that were really well-decorated. AAF uses black in their colors a lot so we had black table coverings with ornate bamboo pads with really pretty bamboo arrangements in glass vases. There were little votive candles burning and gardenias floating in bowls of water. They were still setting up but the vegetarian/vegan lunch was already there and looked very tasty.
Since Jill couldn’t be there because of the horrible events in Sichuan, Alice Ng from the AAF San Francisco office, was our speaker. I introduced myself because we’ve corresponded many times in the two years I’ve been an AAF supporter. She gave a very good, emotional presentation that had a few people tearing up. She also brought a lot of AAF goodies for sale and for a private auction. Next, I met a bunch of nice vegan people who are part of a Florida wildlife conservation group, and a vegan environmental lawyer and they all loved my T-shirt (http://www.cafepress.com/nothoney). When I told them that I donate the proceeds from my T-shirt sales to the coral preservation work of the National Zoo, one girl said “I have to hug you!” I also met Kurt and Lisa Stoner, the owners of the refuge and they were really great hosts.
I tried to use a digital camera to take pictures but every photo turned out blurry no matter how far I was from the subject. Such a bummer because they have beautiful wildlife there. I saw black bears, a black leopard, capuchin monkeys, some spider monkeys that peed on us (or tried to), brown lemurs, ruffed lemurs, and ring-tail lemurs, African lynxes, a white Amur/Bengal tiger mix who was beaten with a baseball bat by his owner (a man named David McMillan of Tiger’s Eye Productoins – http://www.petatv.com/tvpopup/video.asp?video=tigereyeprod&Player=wm – he supplies beaten animals to Ringling, too, which makes him a worthless piece of shit), a Bengal tiger once owned by some asshole on a farm, cotton-top tamarins, Egyptian fruit bats, a great big lizard, emus, and an African serval. I’d never seen a serval or the cotton-top tamarins before. They were beautiful. Visit http://www.peaceriverrefuge.org/ to see some of the non-human beauties I met yesterday.
All in all it was a great day and I’m so glad I had this opportunity to attend an AAF Roadshow event. You can keep up with the rescue efforts in Chengdu by Jill and her staff by visiting her blog.
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Filed under: conservation
