An amazing community in Seal Beach, California, have been helping the owner of their local donut shop spend more time with his ailing wife by buying all of his products so he can close hours earlier than usual.

John and Stella Chhan have been running the modest Donut City donut shop on Pacific Coast Highway for almost three decades, but a few weeks ago some of their regular customers noticed that part of the duo was missing. John was still boxing and bagging donuts behind the counter, but Stella was nowhere to be found. She had suffered a debilitating aneurysm at the end of September which had left her unable to communicate or move for several weeks. Even though she had started to speak again, the woman was still recovering in a rehabilitation facility, and John went to be with her every day after selling out. But their local community decided to help them spend more time together.

Read More »

Edgardo “Perros” Zuniga has been travelling all around Mexico on a tricycle, looking for abandoned and injured dogs to rescue and put up for adoption. He has rescued over 400 dogs in the last 5 years.

When he left his home in Jalisco in 2013, 48-year-old Edgardo set a very clear goal for himself – to help as many stray dogs as he possible could. Over the last five years, he has travelled through 14 Mexican states and rescued over 400 abandoned dogs, by nursing them back to health and later placing them in the hands of staff at various adoption centers. He also helped dogs that weren’t eligible for adoption, by treating their illnesses, feeding them and doing everything in his power to improve their lives before continuing his journey. He travels with a pack of loyal dogs that make up his ‘rescue team’ and that he claims make his job a lot easier by showing the strays he encounters that they can trust him.

Read More »

A 6-year-old girl from China’s Ningxia autonomous region managed to melt the hearts of millions with her dedication to her disabled father who she has been taking care of ever since her mother left them.

Tian Haicheng, a 38-year-old man from Haiyuan County, in Ningxia, had his entire world turned upside down four years ago, when he was involved in a serious car accident. He lost his ability to walk, and was left with use of arms, which made him unable to work and support his family. His wife took their son and abandoned him and their 6-year-old daughter. But instead of Tian having to somehow take care of his girl, she was the one who took up most of the responsibilities, including cooking, cleaning, and making sure that Tian was well taken care of.

Read More »

Wallace the Great, an 11-year-old rescued mule from Gloucestershire, recently made history by becoming the first ever mule to win an official horse dressage competition in Britain.

Wallace and his trainer, Christie Mclean, had been turned down from official dressage events several times on grounds that he wasn’t a true horse, but a cross between a horse and a donkey, which technically makes him a totally different species, with different chromosomes. However, earlier this month, British Dressage finally ruled in favor of allowing mules to compete in official dressage competitions alongside horses and ponies, as a testament “to inclusion and diversity in dressage, making the sport more accessible to all.” Wallace the Great finally had a chance to prove that when it came to dressage, mules could be just as good, if not better than purebred horses, and on July 22nd he did just that, winning his first British Dressage competition.

Read More »

A 30-year-old woman from California is being hailed as a hero for saving a stranger’s life by donating one of her kidneys to him.

At the start of 2018, Jessica Morris, a 30-year-old dental technician from Orange County, California, set a very special new year resolution – to save someone’s life. A two-hour drive away, in San Francisco, freelance writer David Nachere, also 30, had almost given up hope of finding a kidney donor after suffering from end-stage kidney failure for six and a half years, and was coming to terms with the idea of dying. But he decided to give it one more shot and posted an ad for a kidney on Craiglist. Luckily for him, Jessica was looking for a way to fulfill the promise she had made to herself and contacted him.

Read More »

They say money doesn’t grow on trees, but there’s a dog in Colombia that would certainly argue with that. The clever pooch started paying for biscuits with tree leaves after seeing students pass banknotes to a food stall attendant in exchange for the tasty treats. He decided to try it for himself one day, and after getting the result he wanted, he’s been doing it ever since.

Negro recently became a social media sensation after a teacher at the Diversified Technical Education Institute of Monterrey Casanare, in Colombia, shared some photos and a video of the clever dog paying for treats with tree leaves. Students had apparently been buying the pooch biscuits from an on-campus food stall for a while, and after observing humans handing out money in exchange for the tasty treats, he decided to try it out for himself. Only instead of actual money, he used a much more accessible currency – fallen tree leaves.

Read More »

A Japanese animal lover risks her life every single day by venturing into the Fukushima exclusion zone to feed a heard of 11 cows abandoned after the 2011 nuclear disaster.

The earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit Fukushima in 2011 claimed the lives of over 20,000 people, and forced another 160,000 to leave everything behind and flee to safety. But while people were able to escape the threat of radiation from the damaged reactor at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, animals could not. The area was home to over 3,500 cattle which became known as the “nuclear cows of Fukushima” after being exposed to high levels of radiation. Most of them are dead now, killed by starvation or euthanized by the government, but the few surviving cows now rely on the kindness of humans brave enough to risk their lives to bring them food and water.

Read More »

Wang Mingqing’s daughter went missing 24 years ago, but even if the chances of finding her became lower with each passing year, he never gave up hope. After decades of tireless searching, the nearly-impossible happened – Wang received confirmation that his daughter had been found thousands of miles away, on the other side of the country.

Wang’s life was forever shattered on January 8, 1994. He and his wife were serving customers at their their fruit stall in Chengdu, China’s Sichuan province, and their 4-year-old  daughter Wang Qifeng was playing nearby. All the man remembers is that they both lost site of the girl for a little while, and she was gone. When they realized she was missing, both parents started looking for her, calling out her name and asking passers-by if they had seen her. They spent all day searching for Qifeng, but when they finally went home at 1 a.m., all they could do was weep.

Read More »

At 17-years-old and suffering from kidney failure, Stanley the cat was on the last of his nine lives. Luckily, his owner decided to gift him a tenth, by shelling out $19,000 for a kidney transplant.

Betsy Boyd earns just $46,000 a year, working as a part-time writing professor, and her husband Michael is a freelance journalist and a stay-at-home dad for their 3-year-old twin boys. They’re not exactly rolling in dough, but when presented with the chance to save their favorite cat’s life in exchange for $19,000, they didn’t hesitate. They even agreed to adopt his donor after the transplant, just so they could have Stanley a little longer.

Read More »

Five years ago, a compassionate Shanghai policeman took on the role of son to help comfort an elderly couple he had never met before. They had lost their own son in a tragic accident 15 years ago, and the policeman’s similar appearance helped comfort them.

In 2003, Liang Qiaoying and her son, Liang Yu, from North China’s Shanxi province, were exposed to poison gas, during a freak accident. The woman survived, but her young son did not. Liang, a former schoolteacher, was left paralyzed and mentally impaired following the accident, and her husband, Xia Zhanhai, could not bear to tell her the truth about their son. Instead, whenever his wife asked to see Liang Yu, he kept saying that he had gone to work in another city.

In 2010, while watching a television show about police work in Shanghai, Xia Zhanhai was stunned to see an officer that looked just like his deceased son. He immediately knew that the young man was the answer to making his wife smile again, but he had know idea how to get in touch with him. He hadn’t caught his name, and all he had to go by was that he was stationed in Pudong, 1,500 km away. But that wasn’t going to stop him.

Read More »

Romy McCloskey, a professional costume designer from Texas who also raises monarch butterflies as a hobby, recently received a lot of praise online, after a series of photos of her using household items to fix the deformed wing of one of her butterflies went viral.

McCloskey apparently started raising monarch butterflies and releasing them into the wild, a while ago. Recently, she noticed that one of the insects was born with a broken left wing, as a result of an injury sustained while pupating, and could not fly. Monarchs can live from 2 weeks to about 5 months, but without the ability to fly, this little guy wasn’t going to live very long. So Romy, who describes herself as a “master hand embroiderer”, decided to use her skills to help him.

Read More »

An Illinois man who has been offering shelter to homeless people in his Chicago neighborhood has been ordered by city officials to cease and desist or risk having his home condemned.

Greg Schiller, of Elgin, Illinois, began opening his home to a group of homeless people last month when the temperatures dropped dangerously low. He filled his unfinished basement with cots and blankets and started organizing “slumber parties” for homeless people with no place to go. He would offer them food and warm beverages and even put on movies for them to watch until the morning. Unfortunately, his kindhearted effort didn’t sit well with local authorities who are now threatening to condemn his home if he doesn’t stop his so-called parties.

Read More »

A squirrel that was nearly killed eight years ago by an owl when she was just four weeks old, continues to visit the Greenville County, South Carolina family that rescued, raised and later released her into the wild.

In October 2009 the baby squirrel was left severely injured after being attacked by an owl. She would not have survived for very long in the wild, but fortunately, a wildlife rescue group happened to find her. They rescued her, treated her injuries and eventually placed her in the the care of Brantley Harrison and her family, in Greenville County. The Harrisons were no strangers to rescuing and rehabilitating wild animals, but, for some reason, they formed a very unique bond with this squirrel.

Read More »

It’s the stuff fairy tales are made off: parents are parted from their child, years or decades pass, and then chance or fate reunites them. This, however, is no fairy tale but a very real one and involves a Chinese couple and the daughter they had to give up to ensure her survival. And as it happens in real life, things don’t always go smoothly. Qian Fenxiang and her husband Xu Lida finally met their daughter Jingzhi, 22 years after they left her as a newborn baby in a vegetable market. The girl was adopted by an American family and grew up as Catherine Su Pohler, or Kati for short.

The Kodak moment reunion was made possible by the note Qian left with her baby girl. Kati’s adoptive parents, Ken and Ruth Pohler of Hudsonville, Michigan, were deeply moved by the contents and decided they would tell the girl one day if she wanted to know. When the day of the revelation came in 2016, Kati was 21 and a college student. It took another year before she got to meet her birth parents on the famed Broken Bridge in Hangzhou.

Read More »

Mohamed Bzeek, a 62-year-old Muslim immigrant in California, has spent the past two decades caring for terminally ill foster children. These children are neglected by the foster care system, frequently spending the whole of their short lives in state-run hospitals, and rarely get to experience love, hope, and laughter.

About 600 of the 35,000 children monitored by the Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services fall under the care of the department’s Medical Case Management Services, which serves those with the most severe medical needs. There is a desperate need for loving homes for these children, but Mohamed Bzeek’s is the only foster home in the county known to take them in.

Read More »