Dancing Star Animal Sanctuaries

Part 1: Distinguishing between a wild and domestic sanctuary

By Jane Morrison and Michael Tobias

As a metaphor for the larger world of species at risk, Dancing Star Foundation’s animal sanctuaries in California are — like so many sanctuaries around the world — focused upon the very serious realities of marginalized “domesticated” and “wild” individuals whose lives have been haunted by the ways of the world. All these animals were rescued from circumstances that would otherwise have spelled their doom.

Cows and steers, for example, have typical life spans in human captivity of less than two years. These are the ones destined to end up in some consumer product, or on a dinner plate. In the wild, however, a bovine may live twenty-five years; burros between forty and sixty years.

The distinctions between “wild” and “domestic” are increasingly blurred as new research reveals the common sense logic that when any animal is given its freedom, he/she is likely to respond with primordial joy; a physiological response that can never be blunted. Human practices worldwide currently amount to the slaughter of well over fifty billion animals per year for human consumption. If you multiply all those species times the millions of individuals found, on average, within each species category, we begin to grasp some sense of the multitudes of lives that are lost beneath the oblivious runaway train that is human destruction. In the wake of this trespass by Homo sapiens in the name of expediency, development, taste buds, consumer habits, indifference or outright cruelty, the sanctuary movement has converged thousands of years of human love and compassion, spiritual tradition, ethical practices, tolerance and rationality into a pragmatic idealism that seeks to shelter, nurture and give back to the world, not merely exploit it.

Beginning during the Paleolithic era, twenty to thirty thousand years ago, when artisans rendered certain cave habitats as “off limits” or “sacred space” — cave walls upon which were painted with great acuity and tenderness the lives of other animals observed by our ancestors — and continuing to the 12th century with the creation of one of the first wildlife sanctuaries in Europe at Epping Forest in today’s London, the sanctuary movement has gathered great steam. In 1832 dozens of hot springs in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas were protected, as were subsequent regions in Prussia, and then at the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias on June 30th, 1864. Eight years later, in 1872, Yellowstone was enshrined as the world’s first National Park. At that time, President Ulysses S. Grant stated that Yellowstone was to be “dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” Soon after, Australia, Canada and New Zealand followed America’s lead and the idea of national parks took hold worldwide with over 100 nations today containing national parks, including two in as poor a country as Haiti — Pic Macaya and La Visite.¹

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Part II: History and future of the animal sanctuary culture

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1. See Sanctuary: Global Oases of Innocence by Michael Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison, With a Foreword by Her Majesty Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck, Queen of His Majesty the Fourth King of Bhutan, Tulsa and San Francisco: Council Oak Books, A Dancing Star Foundation Book, 2008, pp. xii-xiii.