CelebMix
Stop what you’re doing right now and read this story about environmental activist Elissa Sursara who this week saved a lonely zebra that somehow found its way into a horse meat auction in the United States.
Using her popular Twitter account, the environmentalist and wildlife ambassador posted clips of a stressed and singular zebra to social media, tagging welfare organisations and questioning the legality of keeping zebras in a domestic auction.
Sursara, who tweets about the environment, wildlife and politics, shared the image with almost 200,000 followers on her social media account.
She wrote, “This zebra has somehow ended up on the kill floor to be sold for meat at Bowie Auction Horses in the US. Is there anything we can do to get him or her out? Is this even legal?”.
Next she tagged the animal welfare giant PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) who swiftly took her report to their cruelty investigations department.
But it was Sursara’s Twitter follower, Briana (@AshesofEden12) who saw the post and sprung to action as a local.
“She started direct messaging me on the site and talked about having a friend who had some information about a sanctuary. Her husband also had some ideas on what to do,” Sursara told CelebMix exclusively.
“The next thing I knew, I’d gotten a message to say the zebra had been resuced and the auction was being investigated,” she added.
Sursara said she had been midway through setting up a GoFundMe page to collect donations to purchase the zebra from the auctioneers when she recieved the message the zebra had been rescued.
“I wasn’t allowed to say very much; I suppose it was because the people working on locally didn’t want to spook the auction house. They had gotten a lot of negative attention already,” she said.
Reports now claim the zebra has been rescued and is being held at a sanctuary. Sursara said she could not directly confirm the report but that it had appeared the zebra was no longer available for auction at Bowie’s.
When asked about the power of social media to effect change, Sursara said, “it boggles the mind how quickly you can reach people. Within a few hours of my post, this person had sprung to action and an entire operation had been set up. I was just a messenger.”
Sursara has been an environmental activist for almost a decade, having spent two summers in Antarctica fighting against illegal whaling for the Animal Planet series Whale Wars. She also appeared on Totally Wild and is the ambassador for Australia Zoo’s Wildlife Warriors.
