Talking Animals

Jill Robinson, founder of Animals Asia Foundation

Jill Robinson–the founder and executive director of Animals Asia Foundation., a Hong Kong-based organization devoted to the welfare of wild and urban animals in Asia – recounts her initial experiences and observations about the treatment of animals in Asia upon relocating to Hong Kong from England in 1985.

 

 

She also discusses going to work for the International Fund For Animal Welfare in those first few years, before founding Animals Asia – and how her first visit in 1993 to a bear farm changed her life and helped guide the pioneering path she forged in improving animal welfare on that continent. (She also describes how bear farming works and what it looks like, and explains how there are other – often medically-safer–substances available to substitute for the bile extracted from these bears.) Jill sounds multiple notes of optimism in noting that, over the years, there have been tremendous inroads in this regard across much of Asia, including that numerous other animal organizations have formed, helping shoulder the burden that Animals Asia had initially contended with on its own. (www.AnimalsAsia.org)

COMEDY CORNER: Steven Wright “Ants” (www.StevenWright.com)

MUSIC: Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross,” The Dead Weather’s “I Cut Like A Buffalo,” instrumentals

NAME THAT ANIMAL TUNE:R.E.M.’s “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight”