Carmen Oprescu is the type of person who’s been in touch with animals since childhood. “When I was four years old, my parents had a beautiful cow in the countryside. One of her calves chased me around the yard. I got very angry then, and we butted heads,” Carmen begins. At the age of fourteen, she received a puppy as a birthday present, and since then she and animals have been inseparable. Now she has two dogs and a cat, and also two bears adopted at a distance—Max and Misha. “I knew Max from the Peles Castle. In the late 70s, we were kids and we went with our teacher to visit the castle. When my teacher saw Max, she tried her best not to argue with the guy who kept the bear tied up, but she couldn’t resist. I got so angry when a group of people began to argue with my“teach,” because they wanted to take pictures of the bear.” Most likely, that tormented bear wasn’t Max, but another bear detained by the illegal owner. “Only in 2010, after reports appeared on TV and I saw that bears could be adopted, did I think that that was the best time for me to help him.” She adopted Misha later, impressed by the efforts of AMP to rescue the bear cub from the South Ossetia war zone.
Carmen believes that her teacher instilled the love of animals in her. “When I met up with my former classmates last year, I noticed that most of us have at least one animal at home.” For Carmen, helping the animals is neither a waste of time, nor of money. “If you give a piece of yourself, you’ll get something back. It’s an investment, not a waste,” says Max’s and Misha’s adoptive mother.
