As a reporter and journalist, you tend to go to many, many events. It comes with the territory of the job, finding out and distributing stories and information.
So when I turned up for a talk at Les Cotils from the founder and president of the charity International Animal Rescue, I thought it was going to be informative, and educational, and absolutely hit some moments of poignancy, but I didn’t quite realise how much it would suck in the audience.
Around 70 people were packed into the Harry Bound room. I had to run to grab an extra chair, and find a spare slot at the back as the amount of people interested in hearing from Alan Knight had filled the room.
An hour and a half talk was separated by a 15 minute break for tea, coffee and plant based sandwiches, so in all, it’s around an hour and half event.
Normally at this point the public leaves, funneled out and through the car park, but for this event, that didn’t happen. Normally audience members walk away, and the media descends to get our pound of flesh, but that wasn’t the case.
See Mr Knight had said at the end of the talk that if anyone wanted to stay back and have a chat, he had time before his flight.
Nobody left.
From my vantage point, seated at the back on the extra chair I had to grab, every single person stayed, some just to shake his hand, some to say thank you and offer a donation, or to sign up as a friend of the charity, a few questioning placement for volunteers or lending their expertise in whatever field they work in.
A reputation built on impact
When you meet someone who’s made a tangible impact on the world people take notice.
Having listened to Alan Knight OBE talk through the work he’s done over the past 38 years, IAR certainly falls into the category of ‘tangible impact’.
It’s responsible for finishing off the dancing bear trade in India, a horrific practice which involved threading a coarse, rough rope through the nose, and out the top of the snout. It also saw the removal of the bear’s teeth.
It has helped save Macaque monkeys from cages on the streets of Indonesia, somewhere that they’re seen as vermin. Lions in Armenia, Slow Lorises, orangutans, and of course, many, many more species of bears, have also been saved.
It goes further than that though, with the secondary impacts of their work. Volunteers signing up to help animals have gone on to earn doctorships, new strains of diseases have been discovered, and research papers published.
They’re even helped humans in the process. Those that profited off that Dancing Bear trade weren’t locked away, instead their reliance on the animals for funds and finance was broken, and communities have sprouted up in the place of a parasitical relationship between humans and the natural world that had been cemented as a centuries long tradition.
It was this impact that had managed to hold the audience on tenterhooks, the edge of their seat, and eager to have their two minutes with the man responsible for starting IAR in the first place.
“I don’t know how long I’ve got, but I’ll continue doing it, because it’s not a job, it’s just a passion”
After the audience had left, and with Mr Knight’s flight creeping closer, I got the chance to ask a few questions of the man who had captured the audience’s attention so easily.
Such as, which rescues hit the closest to home?
“Undoubtedly, the rescue of all the dancing bears in India,” he told me. “That’s a 400 year old tradition! It started with the Mughal emperors, when the calendar gypsies were used as court jesters, they would go into the courts of the Mughal emperors and entertain them with these dancing bears. They had quite a high level then in society, and over the centuries, it’s been reduced to the lowest level of society. So they were just really at the end of their trade.
“So we came along at the right time, I think, and we offered them alternative livelihoods, which they wanted to do. We managed to save all those bears, and we’re still looking after them, 165 are still within our care! So I’m extremely proud that we’re probably one of the only animal welfare charities, if not the only one, who’ve actually fulfilled their aims and objectives.”
To exterminate the Dancing Bear trade, IAR effectively replaced it with honest work and jobs for the people destined to that life. Instead of meeting cruelty to animals with cruelty to people, IAR took the high road, it brought humanity, back to those people;
“When I first started I was totally opposed to doing any work with the gypsies, but when you see that their whole family depends on that bear, and that is the wife, the children, the grandparents, all of them are, you know, having to rely on that bear to give them money. If you take that bear away, they have no money, so their only option is to turn to crime or become, you know, poverty stricken,” said Alan.
“I don’t want that. It took me a long time to come to that realisation, and I honestly felt that our supporters wouldn’t support it, but we had the Daily Telegraph come on a rescue with us down in Agra and they came out, and they took a bear with us, and basically they looked at the whole project. I said, ‘Look, we have to look after these people’. We give them the equivalent of 50,000 rupees, which at the time was 700 pounds, and that will allow them to try and set up a completely new profession, an alternative livelihood. That’s a win!
“They went out with that story, and everybody supported us, and I felt, well, that’s the change that I need, and that made me believe that animal welfare and people welfare are inextricably linked. You can’t have one without the other.”
It’s safe to say that Mr Knight found the support for his charity that he was searching for in Guernsey, if the crowd deciding to stay put even after the talk has ended was anything to go by.
He said we could end up that we see a more regular relationship blossoming between Guernsey and the IAR.
“It’s amazing! Actually, I was a bit embarrassed because I thought there was something else coming, and I didn’t know what it was, so that was amazing to see people sitting there, wanting to talk! Some just came up and shook my hand and said, ‘Thank you so much. It means a lot to us.’ and I just kept saying, please become a friend.
“If you become a friend, it will allow us to continue doing this work into the future. That’s what we’re desperate for. It was a bit of a risk coming here, but I’m delighted to say that we’ve had such a wonderful response, and everybody has been so supportive!
“We hope that this will be the start of maybe a yearly thing where we can come and update people We already have lots of good donors on the island, and we have donors in Jersey as well, so maybe we’ll make it a two Island stop next time!”
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