Monty, a white mongrel with black ears and a thoughtful expression, sat next to her owner at a Windhoek shopping center and enjoyed pats from small children, as their mothers shrieked in surprise.
The mums were paging through a calendar showing Monty posing with women, well, showing the full monty themselves, in the nude, discretely covered at strategic areas by dogs, cats and even a rabbit.
Desperate to raise funds for the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), 12 mostly middle-aged Namibian pet lovers bared it all with furry models from an animal shelter — though most of these animals were since lucky enough to be adopted.
The outcome was a tasteful collection of professional black and white photos in a calendar with the motto: “Dare to go bare because we care.”
“We were extremely nervous at the first shooting session, but sipping some good wine helped, and photographer Tony Figueira was very understanding,” said Tatjana Rapp, an SPCA committee member in the Namibian capital.
What started as a joke, with an ambitious print run of 2,000 copies at 300 Namibian dollars each (US$40), became a money-maker in the Christmas shopping fever.
“We have sold just over half of the calendars now and hope all are gone by the end of the year,” said Rapp, a businesswoman with her own company who posed with Snoopy, who resembles a terrier.
The project was modeled on the original “Calendar Girls” in Britain, a group of women who produced a nude calendar in 1999 to raise funds for leukemia research after the husband of one of the women died of the disease.
Their story was told in a 2003 award-winning film of the same name and they still raise funds for medical research with their calendars every year, though they no longer bare it all.
The Namibia project was inadvertently launched by a radio joke.
“We were unaware of this, but a commercial radio station told listeners on April 1, April Fools Day this year, that the Windhoek SPCA would produce a nude calendar like the British originals,” said Monty’s owner Kirsten Drews, another SPCA committee member.
“People phoned the SPCA during that day asking if this was true. That is how we found out,” said Drews, who did October with a Siamese cat. “After talking to the ‘culprits’ at the radio station and having had a good laugh, we actually said: ‘Why not?’ and then seriously started to plan the project.”
A pediatric nurse, Drews recently started training dogs for use in therapy with elderly people and disabled children. Monty is set to become Namibia’s first qualified therapy dog, if he and Drews pass their exams in Germany.
The models — mainly SPCA committee women and volunteers, and a radio announcer from the station that started it all — hope to raise 600,000 Namibian dollars, about half of the annual SPCA budget.
“The SPCA has annual operating costs of about 1.5 million Namibian dollars and we depend entirely on donations, membership fees and fund raising projects,” Rapp said as she sold another calendar.
Calendar production costs were minimal, with professionals donating time for photo shoots, layout and art work, and companies sponsoring the cover and calendar pages.
The project also aims to raise awareness about the responsibilities of pet ownership, notably during the holidays when animals are often abandoned as owners head on vacation or hurt on pointy fences and walls in a panicky flight from the sound of New Year’s Eve fireworks.
“So many lost, frightened and injured pets are brought to our shelter then. Our staff and volunteers work in overdrive,” said “May girl” Ilga Gluck, the SPCA chairwoman who posed with Oscar, a Siamese cat.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS