/Mary Hutton is an inspiration to me. You may have heard of savethebears.org.au - you may not. Well to tell you a bit about how it came about I will tell you a bit about Mary. She became passionate about saving bears after watching an ACA programme (rare for a current affairs programme to show something like this) about Asiatic Black bears held in coffin sized cages unable to move or turn with dirty catheters inserted directly into their gall bladder. These bears are kept this way as traditional Asian medicine uses bear bile so from the 80's, bears were kept in horrible conditions and milked for their bile.
First Mary set up a petition outside a shopping centre asking people to help free the bears. She received thousands of signatures and supports and in 1995 began free the bears as a non for profit charity.
She then joined forces with John Stephens who told her about the Sun bear, which are kept in restaurants and butchered for bear paw soup. John and Mary rescued a number of bears from Cambodia and brought these bears back to Australia to start a breeding programme. With more bears needing help, then came along the Cambodian Bear Sanctuary, which is the world’s largest sanctuary for Sun bears and has educated hundreds of thousands of Cambodians about the threats facing their wild bear populations! The next challenge was India and the rescuing the poor dancing bears. Very tough. The fund joined with the wildlife SOS and the first 25 bears entered the Agra Bear Sanctuary in 2002. in 2009 - “Raju” the last of India’s dancing bears is handed over, bringing the dancing bear trade to an end!! That's over 500 dancing bears rescued in India, an amazing achievement.
Mary is now at 71 years of age and is still fighting to bring bear bile farming to an end and strives to educate and strengthen law enforcement to help bears in need all over the world. Mary has helped the WSPA with their efforts in saving bears and also involved in bear sanctuaries in Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.. Mary message: "Free the Bears fund is to protect, preserve and enrich the lives of bears throughout the world."Free the bears have saved in total an amazing 751 bears!! In India: 525, Cambodia: 140, Vietnam: 33, Laos: 23, Thailand : 25, Indonesia: 5.
Mary inspires me because she followed her passion of wanting to help these amazing animals that cant help themselves. She united other people with the same passion and shows there is hope and you can help. Sometimes with all the brutality I see animals going through, I lose hope. This shows me that I must not give up, that my passion will help and I will be dedicating my life to helping animals that cannot help themselves. My aim is to go over to volunteer in Asia one day, hopefully for a few weeks. This is one of the many heroes out there and I will be sharing more.
To find out more about free the bears and their work, or to donate or help out, please visit http://www.freethebears.org.au/
