The Howletts Wild Animal Trust need your help to provide a forever home to rescued animals in desperate need.

Before the unexpected second lockdown was announced, we began work on our most ambitious UK project to date. Our team plan to rehome a family of brown bears from Andorra and three lions who were rescued from a vile circus in France. Custom built sanctuaries will be created for these animals at Port Lympne, a 600-acre wildlife park in the Kent countryside.

Mojito, Timothy and Anthares were shamelessly bred purely to be exploited. Mojito and Timothy were rescued from the cruel, abusive clutches of Circus Wonderland where they were deliberately underfed to keep them weak and small enough to use for photoshoots. This has left Mojito with a serious health condition for which he will require specialised care for the rest of his life. Anthares was confiscated from another circus where he was forced to perform and lived in a tiny, filthy trailer. It was only thanks to the actions of AAP Animal Advocacy and Protection that these poor lions escaped short and painful lives.

Our friends at Bears In Mind alerted us to the plight of Julio, Enciam and Neu: three brown bears who will soon be homeless, along with their three young cubs. The familys current home is an adventure park in Andorra. However, the park will soon be closing their zoo and this young family desperately needs a forever home where their cubs will be safe to grow up.

Our expert team has designed safe, custom-built sanctuaries where these animals can live peacefully and display natural behaviours while receiving the best possible care at Port Lympne. However, without vital visitor and short breaks income, the future of this vitally important project has been thrown into doubt.

We barely survived the first national Coronavirus lockdown and received no meaningful support from the UK government. The £100m Zoo Animals Fund was inaccessible to almost all large animal parks and we reopened with our future on a knife edge and a £2m hole in our finances.

However, we are fighting more than a virus. We refuse to allow another lockdown to disrupt our mission to protect animals in desperate need of our help. We can not ignore the suffering of Mojito, Timothy and Anthares or Julio, Enciam and Neu and their babies. We have a duty to step in and write the final chapter in their rescue and rehoming story.

Regardless of whether our gates are open or not, it costs us more than £300,000 a week just to operate our Parks. Our animal keepers cannot be furloughed, our food bills will not change and the costs of keeping our animals and teams safe remains the same. This lockdown has pushed Port Lympne and Howletts into hibernation. Tragically, without your help we may be forced to abandon our animal rescue and rehoming plans.

The only way we can save these animals is with your help. Any donation you make, no matter how small, will help us to provide a safe forever home where Mojito, Timothy, Anthares, Julio, Enciam, Neu and their cubs can live peacefully for the rest of their lives.

Keeping both parks running during lockdown is going to cost us £1,200,000. The creation of new sanctuaries at Port Lympne for Mojito, Timothy, Anthares, Julio, Enciam, Neu and their cubs will cost £250,000. We need your help to raise £1,450,000 to give these animals the future they deserve.

Our gates may be closed, but our hearts are open. These animals need us and we need you. Please help us.