The Campaign to Bring Kei Home

Greg Leisure, the organiser and founder of the campaign talks about how he came to know Kei.

Kei’s campaign at winning her retirement to a sanctuary in North America began on November 12th, 2004. However, my interest in her and the other animals at Okinawa City’s Kodomo no Kuni began years ago.

When I first visited in the harsh summer heat of 1995, I remember seeing all the animals in small barren enclosures pacing on concrete. It was a visit that left me saddened and angered over the treatment of animals that I saw were having food thrown at them and being mocked by barks, howls, and cat calls. A total disrespect for the animals’ needs permeated the entire atmosphere.

The one display that I stopped the longest in front of was the wolf display. Inside this 5 X 7 yard enclosure were two North American Timber wolves that paced uncontrollably, seemingly oblivious to even each other’s presence. These two wolves were Kei and her brother when they young.

I left that day assuring myself that there must be an animal welfare group working to better these conditions. I guess that was just a convenient way for me to allow myself to “not look back” and go on with my life. And, go on with my life is what I did.

Years pass and almost ten years later, I, still living in Okinawa, find myself reading an AP story that got picked up by Japan’s largest circulated English language newspaper (The Daily Yomiuri). That was a story about a gorilla named Jabari at a zoo in Dallas, Texas. Apparently, Jabari had escaped his enclosure and the police who responded to the situation quickly shot him dead. There were reports that prior to his escape that perhaps some kids were teasing him and that that was the cause of his agitation and subsequent scaling of the wall the kept him in his enclosure. Immediately this story made me think about the zoo here and I resolved myself to visit the zoo here to see if conditions had changed since the last time I had been there.

Before arriving at the zoo I began to wonder if the wolves were still there. After paying my admittance and walking by the same many barren enclosures I had 10 years previously, I once again came to the wolf enclosure. One notable difference greeted me - there was only one. Kei`s brother had died several years before.

But there she was. Kei, after all these years while I worked on my career assuming someone else or a group was working to help her, did her same monotonous pacing, making her journey only to places in her mind. Then, I knew, it was not she who arrived at a destination, but I.

It took ten years for me to arrive at the reality that no one was helping her; that she had endured to walk into my heart and that perhaps these last years of her life, she finally needed someone to help her finish in dignity.

So began the seed of Kei’s campaign that has now grown and spread around the world. It is not only my goal to get her out, but to let the world know that her life was not one in vain and that there is value in noticing this creature that has been doomed and forgotten on the far side of the world - far from the home of her ancestors that I think yearn to feel her pads walking on its soft pine covered dirt.

Click here to visit the Kei website