Actress Jorja Fox is standing in the middle of an airplane hangar in Boulder, Colorado, watching the doors of a Bolivian cargo jet open up. While the sun sets over the Rocky Mountains, individual crates housing twenty-five African lions are unloaded. Although from different prides, the lions share the same fate: rescued from circus abuse, they’re about to embark on a new life. All of a sudden, one lion after the other starts roaring, the sound bouncing off the walls in the giant hangar. A lion’s roar can travel up to five miles, and the roars turn into a symphony never before heard on the Colorado plains. “It’s a sound that completely penetrates you,” says Jorja. “You can feel those roars in your muscles and bones. If something like that had happened in the wild, where I was surrounded by twenty-five lions, I would’ve been petrified! But I wasn’t scared. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever felt.”
Animal rescuer is a role that suits Jorja perfectly. A vegetarian since age 18, she became an ambassador for Animal Defenders International six years ago and has since saved both elephants and lions. The historic lion rescue, which is the subject of the documentary Lion Ark, is the largest of its kind and was the result of ADI’s work helping ban the use of circus animals in Bolivia. The lions now live on eighty acres of land at the Wild Animal Sanctuary. “If you knew the abuse the animals suffer behind-the-scenes, you would never set your foot in a circus,” says Jorja. “There are far cooler things these animals can be doing.”
