I agree with this and admire the effort to keep at least a small piece intact...

I must confess that I find I can't dwell on the problems here in China too much. I can't handle it and I can't find a way to change it.

The animals suffer, yes. But there's also all those thousands of rose kids, sold or snatched away into a life of ignorance, poverty, and misery. There are a lot of poor kids not getting an education because they can't afford the tuition at the "public" schools...assuming their village even has a school and a teacher. There are guys selling spackling compound powder as baby formula. There are guys dumping deadly wastes everywhere. There are developers snatching away people's apartments for little or no money, often with the full complicity of the local authorities. There are factory workers being turned out of their factories without any pay. People are turned out of their homes to make way for a dam, only to find the local cadre charged with paying them their meager compensation has decided to keep all the money himself. It goes on and on.

There are worse places. It's not like India, which tonight will see millions starving amid the filth. It's not like a number of Southeast Asian countries, where tonight a lot of little girls will totter out in their high heels to dance for the perusal of very sick men. But it's bad enough here.

The scale of human misery in this part of the world is still staggering...beyond comprehension. Poverty and corruption and social injustice are ways of life in much of Asia. I can't even handle that; I definitely can't find much room left for cats and bears and monkeys.