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Fearless animal rescuer defies Mugabe's mobs
Sunday Telegraph
April 28, 2002

In the lawlessness of rural Zimbabwe, Meryl Harrison risks her life to save the mutilated and starving farm victims of the 'war veterans'.

It was the one time Meryl Harrison allowed herself to cry. More than 600 pigs were dead or starving on a farm taken over by Robert Mugabe's "war veterans" from a white Zimbabwean.

"There were scores of rotting carcasses, and the desperate surviving animals were feeding on them," said Ms Harrison, the leader of a project to save or humanely destroy some of the hundreds of thousands of animals that are dying, starving or being mutilated as a result of the assaults on Zimbabwe's commercial farms.

"In the mayhem, a sow was trying to give birth next to dead animals," she said. "A large sow I thought was sleeping in a feeding trough had died where she lay. Piglets were so weak they were just falling over when they tried to walk."
Harrison and her team from the Zimbabwe National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals brave difficult and dangerous circumstances to rescue animals each day.

"As well as rescuing some of the animals deserted on the farms, Meryl and her men put down animals they find with broken backs, broken limbs and gaping wounds as a result of attacks by the war vets," said Estelle Walters, a fund raiser for the ZNSPCA's emergency rescue campaign.

"Cows and sheep are having their hamstrings cut as some kind of political warning by the war vets. Cows have been found alive with axe heads embedded in their bodies. In one case a cow's leg had been cut off for meat and the animal left alive. Un-milked cows are dying in agony, and hooves have been sliced from children's pet ponies."

In the lawlessness that characterises much of rural Zimbabwe, Ms Harrison must remain apolitical and calm, especially when physically threatened by war veterans. She and her colleagues have been barricaded into farms, and their ageing Land Rover bears scars where rocks have been hurled at it.

Ms Harrison, 64, depends on the police to negotiate her passage through roadblocks to reach deserted farms where abandoned dogs are killing sheep and lambs; where war veterans are slaughtering any animals they find – even the farm cats. On a crocodile farm at Mutorashanga, war veterans had released 36 of the reptiles into the bush.

The ZNSPCA's chairwoman, Bernice Robertson-Dyer, said of Ms Harrison: "I just cannot tell you where we would be without this remarkable lady. She is known to everybody and will rarely take no for an answer as long as there are animals in need of help."

Ms Harrison, who was born in London but moved with her parents to Zimbabwe when she was nine, is divorced with two sons, one living in Zimbabwe, the other in Australia.

In addition to horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, dogs and cats, Ms Harrison and her team - black Zimbabweans whom she describes as "fearless" - have rescued abandoned guinea pigs, chickens, geese, turkeys, guinea fowl and lovebirds.
On one farm, the team discovered a farmer who had locked himself in his house with his award-winning bulls in an attempt to save them.

Last week the police gave Ms Harrison an armed escort to save 12 tortoises from a farm, while they refused an escort for an ambulance for a 90-year-old couple who had withstood a 40-day siege but needed to be rescued after the man fell and broke his leg.

She and her colleagues extend their help to black traditional farmers and even war veterans. In one black communal area, with 22,000 donkeys, Ms Harrison treats the animals, holds education classes, mends harnesses and distributes reflectors for the donkey carts. War veterans beg her to treat their newly-acquired sheep, goats and donkeys.

Of the 600 pigs from the farm at Beatrice, 60 miles south of Harare, where she broke down in tears, she managed to save 250. The rest either starved or were slaughtered by the war veterans she had bribed to help her to load the survivors on to a truck.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.

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