About the sanctuary's founder

Firstly, I want to thank everyone for your comments! It means a lot to us that you've visited my blog and it's wonderful to get such positive feedback from you on the bear sanctuary project and our other work.

I wanted to tell you a bit about the amazing Christina Lapis, the sanctuary's founder and how WSPA and I came to get to know her. Her unwavering dedication and devotion to animal protection has driven the sanctuary project from the very beginning.

WSPA have known Christina and her husband Roger, for almost 10 years. I first met her when I went out to Romania to investigate the stray dog problem with her, but while I was there, we heard about two bears that were being kept in a small cage next to a restaurant as a tourist attraction.

Those two bears turned out to be Christi and Lydia, two of the first bears at the sanctuary. Read our news story from 2006, when we rescued them: http://www.wspa.org.uk/latestnews/2006/romaniansanctuary.aspx

From that date, Christina went back to the restaurant every week to feed Christi and Lydia as they weren’t getting the food they needed and were desperately malnourished. The aim was to keep the bears alive until we could rescue them.

In the meantime, we started to hear about more and more bears in similar situations across Romania. Christina began put together a list of the other captive bears, so we could go back and run an investigation.

Christina and Roger have put a huge amount of their time and personal lives into the sanctuary project and without them, the sanctuary would never have happened. They started to speak regularly with Romanian government officials and wildlife authorities, explaining the situation to them.

By the time we were able to go back to Romania to investigate the extent of the captive bear problem in 2004, Christina had made good progress with the government. I went back and with her help, we found there were around 50 bears that needed rescuing from captivity.

With the Romanian government backing the project from an enforcement and legal point of view, WSPA was able to provide the financial backing and the wildlife rescue expertise and building work on the sanctuary started in 2005.

In Romania, Christina is now one of the most well-established and recognisable figures working on animal welfare issues. Known by the media, government and public alike, whenever there is there is an animal welfare issue in the Romanian news, she is the authority that the media go to for answers. Here she is being interviewed by a journalist from a major daily newspaper in Brasov, about the Animal Planet series. These days, Christina splits her time between the bear sanctuary and stray dog refuge she runs in Brasov.

Comments

[Katharine for WSPA UK]

Hi Valeria from Romania, it's nice to hear from a Romanian! We hope that the bear sanctuary will provide an educational programme in the future so that school children in Romania can learn more about wildlife protection in their country. WSPA is also thankful to the government of Romania who are supporting the legal confiscations of the bears held in these terrible captive conditions.

[Valeria]

Hello. I'm from Romania and I'm glad to see that finally something is done for the bears. Even though the bears are not the only animals in this country that need help. But still i consider this a big step and I want to thank you for this! I love animals so much and I want you guys to know that you really make a difference!