The long goodbye Lantau legend Jacqui Green is going home to the UK, and leaving a gaping hole in animal rescue when she does. Elizabeth Kerr reports
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acqui Green barely had the patience to hide what she was really thinking when it was in her and animal rescue organisation Protection of Animals Lantau South’s (PALS) best interest. Now, as Jacqui prepares to return to her native UK for good, she has none. “Nothing is private in social media,” she mentions of a ‘private’ message a niece posted on Facebook a few weeks back. “If I can see this stuff, so anyone can. I’ve got Facebook because of PALS, but… there’s a big message that says contact me on WhatsApp. Not a week goes by I don’t get a message about how someone sent me a Facebook message. What part of ‘don’t message me here’ do people not understand?” Jacqui gives her tousled silver head a shake and rolls her eyes. She sounds like a crank – the neighbourhood curmudgeon. It would be easy to make jokes about her standing at her front door with a rifle shouting at the kids to get off her lawn, but that would be a disservice to the nearly 40-year Hong Kong resident who landed here on an adventure in 1979 and went on to set the standard for animal rescue on Lantau. Closing the book It’s a dull, rainy morning when Jacqui sits down at a corner table in a DB eatery and orders a pot of tea, which she promptly loads up with brown sugar. She’s getting ready for a short, penultimate jaunt
back to the UK to check on the state of her house renovations.
more than just picking up strays and spaying them.
“Yes, I am leaving for good,” she declares with a combination of wistfulness and relief. “I’ve seen the writing on the wall as far as Lantau is concerned. There’s a big difference in the Hong Kong civil service and in civil servants – the lack of initiative is distressing, the contracting out. We can’t even get rubbish picked up. It’s a small thing. But when you add all those small things up, it feels like one step forward two steps back.”
“To run PALS, you’d have to live in South Lantau, and ideally you don’t work. It’s very hands on – trapping and fostering and so on. I’m finding the physical side of it very hard now, and I can’t do it the way I could years ago. I’ve got 11 animals at my place, which is too many,” she laments. It may be a fulfilling job, but it’s not without its downside.
There are so many local dogs that need homes and they’re not getting them. And you can’t keep rescuing if they’re not going out
“It’s too stressful, too time consuming, too physically taxing. There’s a lot of politicking that goes on, and it’s true: You can’t please all the people all the time,” she comments, referring to her support of less popular, media-unfriendly animal welfare positions, like euthanasia. “People don’t understand about homing. Unless you want overcrowding and animals suffering, euthanasia is an alternative. It’s quite contentious. “Everyone is making a fuss about my leaving but no one seems to be stepping into the void,” she adds. Animal activism
What Jacqui sees as massive changes for the worse in the SAR have finally taken their toll, and she’s throwing in the towel. With it, unfortunately, goes PALS. The driving force behind PALS for the last 20 years, Jacqui isn’t passing on the mantle – there’s no one to pass it to. Essentially a onewoman show now, PALS is much
Again, Jacqui sounds bitter – but she’s not, and she’s had her share of victories. PALS was a crucial service 20 years ago when there were no other organisations on Lantau to pick up the abandoned and abused animal slack from the SPCA, but there are more groups chipping in now, notably Hong Kong PAWS Foundation (PAWS).
www.arounddb.com August 2018
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