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CHRISTINE'S ARK - The extraordinary story of Christine Townend and an Indian animal shelter

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Until I started to cry, neither the Sikh driver, Mr. Singh, nor the unwanted sightseeing guide believed me when I said we wanted them to take us to an animal shelter on the outskirts of the ancient Indian city of Jaipur, instead of shopping for rugs. Mr. Singh didn't really speak English, but the tour guide was fluent. Earlier that morning we had refused to ride an elephant to the top of the Amer Fort, and they reluctantly arranged for a jeep. At the temple atop the fort, we were deeply upset to learn that a goat was being sacrificed inside, and refused to enter. At the temple where pilgrims fed pigeons for good luck, we were pursued by a legless beggar on a roller cart. The only experience we had enjoyed that day was when a languor monkey jumped down from a parapet in front of my son Wolf, who was only seven then, in 1997, ripped a garland of marigolds off Wolf's neck, and quickly climbed back to the top of a parapet to eat the flowers. It was over in half a minute. First we shrieked, startled, and then began to laugh. The driver and guide were convinced we were crazy.
When I said we would skip the rest of the tour because we were expected at a place called Help in Suffering that took in sick animals, they didn't seem to comprehend. Instead, they took us to the shopping district to look for rugs. I wrote on a paper the address of the place with the phone number and said we wanted to go there. They talked it over in Hindi, and the next thing we knew we were at a manufacturer's outlet for stone carvings. That's when tears of frustration began flowing and eventually they realized I wasn't going to buy anything expensive. Losing interest in us, the guide had the driver drop him at a tourist bureau, where the baffled Mr. Singh phoned the shelter for directions.
Even with directions, the Help in Suffering sanctuary wasn't easy to find. We drove through the old walled "pink city" to a highway that cut through the typical urban sprawl of a populous Indian city, where temporary huts made of garbage bags sheltered street people on sidewalks that surrounded the walled yards of new middle class dwellings. Mr. Singh stopped several times to ask again for directions. The farther out of town we got, the more likely were the people to know of the animal shelter.
Finally we made a turn off the highway onto a smaller road, and quickly saw a sign for the sanctuary. We drove through the open gate, which hung on whitewashed pillars. The car was surrounded by a pack of barking dogs and people who seemed to like them. At once I felt at home. Through the happy chaos emerged Christine Townend, the Australian managing trustee of Help in Suffering, and her husband Jeremy.
I had known of Christine by reputation for many years. She founded the Australian organization Animal Liberation, and wrote a book, Pulling the Wool, about the sheep industry, before taking over the management of the Help in Suffering sanctuary. The sanctuary was the second of three major Indian humane societies founded by the late Crystal Rogers (1906-1996). Under Christine's direction, Help In Suffering achieved global prominence by conducting a street-dog sterilization program sponsored by the World Society for the Protection of Animals, similar to the Animal Birth Control program pioneered by the Blue Cross of India in Chennai.
Christine was middle-aged and quietly beautiful. Jeremy seemed good-natured and strikingly nice, though "nice" is not usually something that strikes one at all.
We sat in the sanctuary courtyard and ate banana cake, surrounded by dogs rolling in the dust. In the distance was a river that had shrunk from the banks, and outside the walls of the shelter was visible a stone or concrete platform that turned out to be used for funeral cremations. After a relaxing visit came a tour of the sanctuary. Wolf had immediately liked Christine, and behaved as if she were an old friend. He took her hand and together they inspected dogs in cages and talked to horses and donkeys and cows.
I didn't want to leave the sanctuary ever, as it seemed an oasis amidst the hustle and hassles of India, but soon it was time to catch a train for Delhi to attend a conference sponsored by the Animal Welfare Board of India, a quasi-governmental body. Deciding to go also, at the last moment, Christine arranged to ride to Delhi with our driver, Mr. Singh, whose home was in Delhi. Having only been able to cope with the reckless chaos of Indian highway driving by not looking at oncoming traffic, I wondered at the casual way at which Christine arranged for the ride. I found her composure at the prospect of the five or six hour drive into India's capital city quite remarkable. I was relieved and almost surprised to see Christine at the conference the next day, looking as calm as she had been at the sanctuary.
Thus began my friendship with Christine--poet, artist, and animal activist--whose life story is told by biographer John Little in Christine's Ark: the extraordinary story of Christine Townend and an Indian animal shelter. Little binds Christine's multi-faceted history into a coherent whole, along with the story of Jeremy, without whose support through four decades of marriage Christine would not have gone so far, neither in space nor in achievement.
After meeting in India, we stayed in touch through correspondence between Christine and Wolf. Christine would send him cards with pictures of birds, and Wolf would send a drawing in return. Our paths began crossing at international conferences, but it was through e-mail in recent years that I learned that we have more in common than our animal work. Like Christine, I knew I had a definite purpose in life from my earliest awareness in childhood. Once I began to realize it was to help animals, I did my best to tune it out, fearing the pain that comes with compassion for the suffering. Christine, on the other hand, jumped into her role once she saw it, but the realization that her life's work was for the animals came only after a search through various other causes, including aboriginal rights and environmentalism, left her unsatisfied.
Both of us began seeking the meaning of life in childhood, with explorations into various religions that seemed promising but always failed to convince in the end. Unlike me, however, Christine pursued spiritual knowledge with the same dogged determination she brings to her animal welfare efforts. Leaving their two young sons for Jeremy to tend, along with his law practice, Christine traveled to India looking for answers in 1974. There she met a Buddhist nun who was to become her spiritual advisor for many years. On returning to Australia, Christine shaved her head, embarrassing the family, especially the children, who found their mother incomprehensible. Jeremy couldn't fathom her either, but kept hoping Christine would settle down, one episode after another, each taking her farther from his understanding.
A circuitous path with many "accidents" eventually led Christine to her ultimate spiritual guru, Vimala Thakar, whose biography, The Hidden Master, she wrote in 2002.
Concurrent with the spiritual quest has been Christine's work for animals, which began with founding the organization Animal Liberation in 1976 with Australian philosopher Peter Singer, whose book Animal Liberation (published earlier in 1976) gave impetus to the modern animal rights movement. Campaigns for chickens and sheep took Christine into factory farms and aboard the ships that transport live sheep for slaughter in the Middle East, a trade that continues today. Her fight against cruel practices of the Australian sheep industry made her controversial and brought her into conflict with her sister, who had married a sheep rancher.
Christine had seen how animals raised for food were made to live and how they died, always suffering. She thought she was prepared when asked to investigate the hidden beef industry of India. She wasn't. John Little writes of Christine's first trip to an Indian slaughterhouse in 1989:
"In Australia she had seen pigs slaughtered by sticking a knife in the heart; she had seen frightened cattle rolling their eyes as they were carried along a conveyor belt toward their destruction; she had seen sheep electrocuted between the ears in order to render them insensible to slaughter; she had visited ships where Australian sheep were packed three to a square metre to endure the three-week journey to the Middle East; she had seen hens crowded into battery cages, and pigs kept most of their lives behind iron bars. But now she began to understand the massive hidden killing which was happening all over the world. She had not thought until then about the significance to humanity of this calculated, callous war between two kingdoms of nature, with one the permanent victim and the other the eternal aggressor. The cattle, especially, touched her heart. The whipping, the shouting, the pulling and pushing toward the noise and smell of blood, the moans and grunts of dying, bleeding, shattered, ripped creatures--all this they meekly endured with their great, confused, helpless, staring eyes. If they had fought or argued it might have been easier, but their trust and their misery at human betrayal seemed to render them immobile. They raised no protest, no questioning voice. And they almost seemed to redeem whatever was done to them by their soft meditative eyes that were the gentle eyes of herbivores who had never killed, never warred, never tortured; who had worked and served patiently and unquestioningly under the yoke that galled and marred. They were driven and whipped, always hungry, usually thirsty, always tired. Yet at the end of all this they were killed, without having been thanked once, without even one touch of love. She wondered if perhaps somewhere in a field, secretly, a peasant farmer had embraced those sweet-smelling necks for one last time. Perhaps once they had been loved, had been thanked, had known compassion. 'If I could have asked one thing it would have been that someone somewhere had loved them, that my own love could assuage a lifetime of human indifference. I loved them as deeply as it was possible for any person to love. They were my creatures, of me, my beloved animals, my God.'"
In describing her anguish, Christine spoke for all who suffer because of their empathy for animals.
Christine returned to Australia with a heavy heart and the dawning realization that she needed to be in India. A trip to Europe for meetings with animal advocates put Christine in touch with Crystal Rogers. Help in Suffering was then struggling under poor management. Christine was easily talked into going there to see if she could assist. Once there, she knew she had found her destiny, and decided she must continue her work in India even if it meant the end of her marriage. But as she prepared to announce to the long-suffering Jeremy her decision to live and work in India, Jeremy made his own decision to sacrifice his home and law practice and all that he held dear to be with her, in India. Christine flew to Australia to sell their house and put things into storage, and returned to Jaipur with Jeremy, who promptly put his considerable talents to good use at the sanctuary. It was 1992.
After starting the Animal Birth Control program in Jaipur, which eventually sterilized most of the dogs in the city and virtually eradicated rabies there, Christine and Jeremy saw the need for an ABC program in Darjeeling, in the foothills of the Himalayas in northeast India, where they had ventured on a holiday. Christine secured the funding needed to build the Help In Suffering shelter and clinic now serving that region. Meanwhile, in 1998, she helped Pradeep Kumar Nath to begin an ABC program in Visakhapatnam, on the Bengal coast, under the auspices of the Visakha SPCA. This ended the previous municipal practice of electrocuting stray dogs and allowing the killers to sell their skins.
Many of the stories in Christine's Ark include mention of other people who are prominent in the animal welfare cause, not only in India but in Australia and Europe. However, some of the most touching tales that Little chooses to relate are about unknowns and poor people whose poignant struggles to save their own animals make Christine's Ark a story of compassion for people as well as animals. Case after case underscores the bond of interdependence that exists between humans and animals, whose ultimate natural expression is love.
While portions of Christine's Ark might bring the sensitive reader to tears, most of the stories are inspirational and uplifting and some are quite funny. There was a monkey at the Jaipur sanctuary who had recovered from injuries and needed to be released into safe habitat. One day Christine and her helper Daya were "driving past a temple in a nearby suburb when she had an idea. They stopped the car and approached the saddhu ['holy man'] sitting cross-legged under an old peepal tree. He agreed that they could leave the monkey there. The next day they brought the monkey to the temple and released him. He walked quietly to the saddhu and sat on his lap! They returned a few days later to see the saddhu sitting as usual under the tree. The monkey was nowhere in sight. They assumed that he must have fled. The saddhu smiled and quietly lifted his blanket to reveal the monkey asleep underneath. In the peace of the temple the little creature had found a safe refuge for life."
Help in Suffering was not to be the Townends' refuge for life. As they entered their sixties, Christine and Jeremy began to find India more arduous. Frequent bouts with diarrhea from unclean water and the extreme weather of the Rajasthan desert become less tolerable. Christine was badly mauled by a guard dog and required plastic surgery. Christine and Jeremy began to return to Australia more often, and a few years ago started to live in Australia again, with frequent visits to the shelters in both Jaipur and Darjeeling, with which they remain in daily e-mail contact. Christine has recently been painting pictures for an exhibition that benefits Help in Suffering. Far from accepting retirement, Christine recently emailed, "I know I have more work yet to do of a more demanding nature." One can only marvel at her spirit, and hope for a sequel to Christine's Ark.