Julia Roberts and the Sanctuary Sloth Bear

0:03 Hey there, I'm Johnny Mac with 5 Canoe Stories. Zoe grew up watching her father leave for work, never quite knowing where he was going. That's because he was a pilot and the destinations only showed up on his boarding pass. She started at the KLM Flight Academy at 17. By 22, she had her wings. In August, she was on a flight departing from Amsterdam. She climbed into the co-pilot seat and found her father in the left seat. Michelle had been flying for KLM for 35 years. He and Zoe had flown together five times before, but this time, neither of them knew that the other would be on that particular flight. Their schedules had simply aligned. Nobody set this up. This wasn't a stunt for this podcast. This is just how they got scheduled. Zoe turned around and saw her mother.

0:49 Oh yeah, there's more to this. Marjan, who had met her husband while working on a flight, was serving passengers. They all got assigned to the same plane. Zoe said, my parents met while working on a flight, so it really felt like a full circle moment. It was amazing. That's fun. In 2009, a young sloth bear in India was living the kind of life that bears aren't supposed to live. He was kept in a cage. He was forced to dance for tourists. When the performance was done, he went back into the cage. Julia Roberts was in India that year filming Eat, Pray, Love. She was brought to an animal sanctuary and saw the bear. She named him Odum after what she understood to be an old family name. Well, 17 years later, Odum is 26 and living at the Bear Rescue Center in India run by Wildlife S.O.S., The staff wrote, 17 years on from his rescue, Odom's days are calm. He spends his days in the morning swimming in the pool, then a rest in the hammock.

1:40 He has some fruit as well. Sloth bears can live into their late 20s in a sanctuary environment. Odom's been there long enough to be considered an elder. Alan Knight is the president of International Animal Rescue and says our responsibility does not cease when an animal has reached safety. Titan is a black rhinoceros. Naughty is a zebra. They're friends. They both lost their mothers and they both ended up at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Nursery in Kenya one week apart. Titan, the rhinoceros, he arrived first. He was about eight months old. Edwin, one of the keepers, said he would have been at serious risk from lions and hyenas without intervention. A week later, Noddy the zebra showed up and they became best buddies. Each day, the two of them go out to a nearby park with their keepers, grazing, exploring and doing what a young rhino and a young zebra do when they have the space to do it. At night, Titan comes back to the nursery for milk and alfalfa and a hay bed, and Nottie stays close. The plan, as Titan the rhino grows, is to give him increasing freedom. At around five years old, keepers will start leaving his stockade open overnight, letting him decide when to stay and when to go. Eventually, over the years, he's expected to return to the wild. On September 27th, it rained in New York City. Not that remarkable, but the Broadway flea market was scheduled, and the Broadway flea market has learned a few things about the rain. The event is 40 years old this year. It's the annual fundraiser for Broadway Cares Equity Fights AIDS. They raised $ 1, 490, 000 on a rainy Sunday.

3:05 The items on offer as in every year are playbills, costumes, props, signed posters, memorabilia donated by cast and companies and creators who believe that what they make together on stage is connected to something larger than any single show. The year the fundraiser started, the AIDS crisis was devastating the New York theater community. People were losing colleagues and friends and partners faster than anyone had to respond. The flea market was one of the things they built to respond, a way of doing something, of converting grief and love into something that helped. And this year, theater people have been showing up for the same reason since Reagan was president, showed up in the Marine. Nice job. Paula used to be a U.S. merchant mariner. When her ship pulled into port one day with a baby raccoon on board, she took it home, rehabbed it, and decided this is what she would do with her life. She opened Woodside Wildlife Rescue in Mississippi, 20 acres, a river, a pond, and the kind of staff who can teach a raccoon what a raccoon needs to know. They had 76 kit orphans this year alone. Most of them lost their mothers to storms or traffic or other horrible things that happens to raccoons.

4:02 The youngest are bottle-fed indoors for a few weeks until they're vaccinated and ready for the outside world. Then boot camp begins. Paula and the rescue director Raquel teach by example. They get down in the dirt and dig for worms so the raccoons can see how it's done. They crack open pine cones. They take the kits on kayaks across the pond for swimming lessons. They do a live quail hunt. They take the raccoons into the deep woods, teaching the kits to go from tree to tree to stay out of sight of predators. There's a shrill trill for danger that makes the kits scramble up the nearest tree and a short whistle for all clear. When a group of kits is ready about six months in, there's a graduation. They play pomp and circumstance marches. They read a roll call of each of the raccoons' names. A reverend blesses their journey, and they are released into the trees. 76 graduates this year. And those are your five good news stories for today. Have a great day.