After a fire this past weekend at Seri’s grooming shop, I had a small role in helping some of her surviving reptiles get to a caretaker after they were accidentally shipped to the wrong address. That’s how I found out what she is going through. This fire didn’t just take a business and home, it took a piece of her life, including her beloved African Grey of 30 years and many of her reptiles. If you’ve ever loved and cared for animals, you understand the depth of that loss. They are not just animals in our care, they are beautiful souls we love like family. And as if that wasn’t enough, she is also preparing for an upcoming knee surgery. But this is also where something else shows up. Friends and the community. The same love she has given so freely is now finding its way back to her. If you are able to help, even in a small way, it matters. If you can’t, sharing her story matters too. Here is Seri’s GoFundMe: This is what it looks like when we come together. Not just for the animals. But for the people who have spent their lives caring for them. 🤍LM 🙏

Today I’m sharing a tribute written by Angela Sheldrick in remembrance of Kirsty van Zeller, a treasured member of the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust family. Rather than try to summarize it, I want to honor Kirsty by letting Angela’s words stand as they were written. They speak to a life lived with quiet strength, deep compassion, and profound respect for all beings. Here is the link to the full tribute : Remembering Kirsty van Zeller Some lives leave a light that continues to guide long after they are gone. 💚🐘 I want to include the passage Kirsty lived by here. I was especially moved by the words written by naturalist Henry Beston. It reflects a way of seeing animals that feels deeply true to my heart and to the work we do here. We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.