HIS – India

Help In Suffering is a registered Indian charitable trust working for the benefit of the animals of India . It has 2 shelters – one in Jaipur, the other in Kalimpong (West Bengal). A third shelter has been opened in the north of the city, the facilities and funding being provided by the Jaipur Municipality.

Chair of Trustees, Christine Townend, is a Blue Mountains resident who spends half of each year at Help In Suffering, aided by her husband , Jeremy. A talented artist, Christine’s artwork will be on display in Cloudlands from time to time, with all proceeds from sales going to HIS. We have asked Christine to paint some of the Blue Mountains’ beautiful native birds, as we know many of our guests enjoy close contact with the birds at Cloudlands – especially those King Parrots!

Help In Suffering has a number of projects in operation, some of these including camel, equine and elephant projects and an Animal Birth Control Programme where street dogs are humanely captured, sterilized, identified with an ear notch and number tattoo, vaccinated against rabies and released back exactly where they came from. The reported incidence of human rabies cases has reduced to zero for the last several years and the street dog population is stablising ,as a result of this programme.

Creation of an Elephant Homeland

Christine would like to help the elephants all over India, who are increasingly victims of habitat loss due to an expanding human population. Her plan is to establish an elephant homeland, in either West Bangal or Assam . She aims to bring together various animal welfare groups in India to work on this, funded by overseas sponsors . It is envisaged in time the amount of land will increase as more international donations are received. In West Bengal alone, 47 people are killed by elephants each year. To date , Christine has made some progress, with promises by non-government organisations to purchase small areas of land in some states, where old or injured captive elephants could live the remainder of their lives in comfort.

. . . “I was filled with grief and shame that he should be chained like this, in the small courtyard, on cement, in the sun, when he was meant to be pacing and stretching under the canopy , marching through grasses which brushed his knees, and bringing branches crashing, and making birds rise, and filling the whole earth with his triumph and trumpeting . . . And I thought that he accepted his bondage because of his love for the piddling weaklings who crawled around him and did not even feed him properly, because he could have ranted and broken his chains and killed whoever walked near him, but instead he stood mildly, because of the child who crawled on him, and the brothers who brought him buckets of water sometimes when they deemed it necessary but not at all when he wanted it. And I knew why elephants were sacred, and in holy books. And somehow our shelter could not have been complete if this connection had not occurred” ( Christine Townend )

. To find out more about the work of Help In Suffering , or make a donation , visit their web site at www. his-india.org.au .

We proudly have adopted Help In Suffering as our charity at Cloudlands, and look forward to even greater inroads being made for animals, people and the environment.