Grace Gabriel
MIGRATION PATTERN I was born in China and grew up in different places - Nanjing, Beijing, Shanghai and Harbin. My parents were university professors; one of them was teaching in the south, one of them was working in the north, so I travelled a lot. I loved animals even when I was little; of course, that was only reflected in companion animals - dogs and cats. My first cat was found with a broken tail. A classmate of mine told me about how it had been abused and I just felt so bad I took her in. I was about 10. There was no adoption agency where I lived; the rescue concept wasn't there.
My education background is in communications. I went to the [United] States in the mid-1980s to get my master's degree then stayed and worked as a journalist for 10 years, at which point I was invited by the International Fund for Animal Welfare [IFAW] to go back to China and film some of their projects. One was in Panyu district, Guangdong, where the business of farming bears for their bile was founded in the 80s. In the 90s, IFAW had persuaded the Chinese government to release some of the bears. I saw them coming out of their tiny cages and it was the most moving - sad and happy - moment in my life. It was so moving that I decided that I didn't want to be objective as a journalist anymore; I wanted to be fighting for a cause - fighting for animals. That was when I joined IFAW.
EVOLVING ATTITUDES In traditional Chinese culture there is weight to the concept of [a balance] with nature; it is in our literature and art. Buddhist religion [teaches] kindness and compassion towards other animals. But in the past 200 years, a lot of that compassion has been eroded. Animals don't seem to be regarded as living beings, more as a resource to be exploited or eaten. It has to do with war, poverty and also the political movements in the past 50 to 60 years. What all this has damaged is not just how people view animals but also how people view people. Is it really everyone for themselves, or are we all sharing this Earth?
TOO MUCH TO BEAR A lot of times, cruelty to animals is the result of a policy. [IFAW] work is about talking to local officials. In the case of the bears, the officials felt that bile farming was not good for their image, certainly not good for the bears and it wasn't even good for their bottom line. That's when they decided to close the farms and allow IFAW to have the bears.
There are still other farms that [collect bile] - a couple of hundred of them, and close to 10,000 bears in captivity. There are many other cruelty issues linked with government policy. I've worked on many - with tigers, elephants and Tibetan antelopes. Progress has been made in some of these campaigns - especially in reducing demand for wildlife products - but it's still an uphill battle.
A JUMBO PROBLEM When I opened IFAW's China office, I started several projects at the same time. One began in Simao [in Yunnan province] and moved to Xishuangbanna, where people were threatening to kill elephants. Elephants lived as far north as Beijing 3,000 years ago. Today there are fewer than 300 in the wild, living in nine isolated herds in Yunnan. Because elephant habitat is giving way to human agriculture and transportation infrastructure, the animals are coming out of the forest and inevitably come into contact with people. This conflict has manifested [itself] in crop damage and sometimes injuries and deaths, so my main focus was alleviating human-elephant conflict.
In our monitoring, we noticed people don't realise they've taken over elephant territory; and due to lack of education or awareness, humans can behave in very confrontational ways towards elephants. They throw things, make a lot of noise and tease them. Elephants have large brains and long memories - so if they habitually encounter people who [taunt] them ... well, let's just say it [isn't] relationship building.
What we used in Simao were micro-credit loans to help villagers find alternative [ways to make a living] so they do not need to use the forest. They can go into raising ducks for eggs; grow flowers or vegetables; or go into transportation, rather than planting cash crops - such as corn, bananas or rice - that elephants love to eat. [Elephants] are very smart - they can remove a corn cob without destroying the stalk and within one night, eat the whole harvest. In order for the scattered groups of [the mainland's] last wild elephants to be viable - to be able to breed and have offspring - they need to be able to meet. Our concern is that unless migratory corridors are protected, their future is in jeopardy.
IN THE WAKE OF THE QUAKE When the [Sichuan] earthquake happened I was in Beijing. Of course my immediate concerns were for the people in the region but right after that, my concern was for the domestic animals. One concern was the culling of village dogs because local officials feared they would spread disease. We successfully talked Zundao [town] into accepting our rescue team's help in vaccinating every dog in the township, so that's what we did all through June and July last year. Our vets also helped them solve disease issues in their livestock. The township was very safe and there were no outbreaks of any kind due to animals.
One big [benefactor] from the earthquake was the relationship between people and animals. There were a lot of moving pictures of dogs rescuing people and their animals circulating on the internet. We contacted photographers and they donated us the rights to reprint the images in a book celebrating the human-animal bond after the earthquake.
To see Grace Gabriel in action, watch China's Last Elephants on Animal Planet, tonight at 8pm.
