Somehow, in the midst of preparations for one of my favourite days of the year, I also forgot about it! Bell Let’s Talk Day dominates my work life on a Bell/CTV radio station, but I overlooked mentioning it here for some reason. As I was arranging interviews and input from Michael Landsberg, Bob Ezrin, Dr. Michael Goldbloom from CAMH and others for our radio show, I totally forgot to write a blog post about it. Now I’m correcting that.Â
This is such an important initiative. Bell will donate .05 for every text, tweet, Facebook post and share that mentions the hashtag #BellLetsTalk to Canadian mental Health Initiatives. Landsberg, Clara Hughes and others have joined Bell to talk about their stories. Two London mental health advocates who I’m proud to
have gotten to know a bit, Sarah Smith and Paulie O’Byrne, teamed up for this powerful song and video. Let’s end the stigma. (My original post on animal poaching and drones follows the video!)
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Sometimes people can really suck. For example, those in Hong Kong and Vietnam who are using rhino-horn as a medicinal powder. It’s about as effective as ingesting crushed human fingernails, but millions of people believe in it. And those who pay $1000 per kilo of elephant tusk suck too, as well as poachers who can’t find another way of making a living besides killing innocent, endangered animals.
A friend’s young son told me about the videos he’s been watching of drones used by park rangers in African countries, to look for poachers and protect the animals. They’re trying all sorts of ways to prevent poaching, from removing some of the creatures to sanctuaries to surgically removing the horns of all rhinos in an attempt to eliminate the need for poachers to kill them. However it’s done, it’s frightening that there are people with so little regard for the life on this planet and so much effort is expended to try to stop them, especially when poverty incites people on the inside – the rangers themselves – to accept bribes and help the poachers with their gruesome tasks.
If you’re interested in how some of the search-and-rescue operations work, in a sanitized and not at all gross presentation, here’s ABC News coverage of one such effort.Â