Zhou Yusong is known as the “Guardian of Dogs” in his home city of Zhengzhou, China’s Henan Province. The kindhearted man has spent the last 8 years of his life rescuing stray dogs and offering them a home at  his animal protection center.

It all started in 2008, when Zhou Yusong, when he noticed an injured stray dog by the side of a road in Zhengzhou. It had been hit by a car and was fighting for his life, but everyone just ignored it. Unable to do the same, he picked up the canine and took it to a nearby pet hospital. After saving the animal’s life, he took it to a dog shelter, as he had no way of taking care of it himself, in his small apartment. Shocked by the large number of stray dogs already at the shelter, he became more involved in trying to make their lives easier, and started donating 200 yuan ($30) every month, for the animal’s food and medical treatments.

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Bai Yan, a kindhearted police dog handler from Hangzhou, recently melted the hearts of millions of Chinese after it was reported that he had spent the last 7 years and around 1 million yuan ($150,000) on a retirement home for police dogs, where his former “comrades in arms” could live out their golden years in peace.

55-year-old Bai has been working as a police dog handler since 2004, during which time he has trained around 30 canines. Spending so much time with the animals, he became very attached to them, and having seen how some retired police dogs ended up, he knew he had to do something about it. The trainer recently told Chinese media that one of the things that convinced him to open a retirement home for police dogs was seeing  an old police dog who had been completely neglected by his new owner lying in the dirt with a chain around its neck and a bowl of spoiled food in front of him. Retired police dogs are usually put up for adoption with the general public, and there is very little vetting of potential owners.

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Bai Shufang, a doctor at a vitiligo hospital in Beijing, China, has been dressing up as a traditional opera character, complete with elaborate facial makeup, as a way to make her patients feel more relaxed.

After noticing that many of her patients had trouble opening up to her about their condition, which affected her ability to prescribe the best treatment for them, Chinese dermatologist Bai Shufang decided to help them relax by adopting a different persona. Many people are uncomfortable and tense around doctors, so she thought that by radically changing her appearance, she should help them get over their nerves. For the past couple of weeks, Bai Shufang has been spending about an hour every morning, dressing up as a Chinese opera performer, and putting up layers of thick traditional makeup.

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Dr Sarojini Agarwal lost her daughter in a road accident, nearly 40 years ago, but the tragedy inspired her to help other abandoned girls. Since the mid 1980s, the 80-year-old woman has taken in around 800 girls, caring for them and ensuring that they receive a good education, in order to become confident and independent individuals.

Sarojini was driving a motorcycle on a road near her home in Lucknow, India, with her 8-year-old daughter, Manisha, on the back seat, when they became the victims of a hit and run accident. The mother survived, but her precious Manisha died that day. Dr Agarwal spent years morning her loss, and asking herself “why my child”, until one day when she realized that there were so many girls out there in need of motherly love, and helping them would be the best way to honor Manisha’s memory.

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Elisabeth Anderson-Sierra, a 29-year-old mother-of-two from Beaverton, Oregon, suffers from a rare condition known as Hyperlactation Syndrome. She produces about 1.7 gallons of breast milk per day, almost 10 times as much as most lactating women, and spends around 10 hours every day nursing and pumping her milk. She has so far donated 600 gallons (2.5 tonnes) of breast milk to milk banks and families in need of it.

Ever since falling pregnant with her older daughter, Isabella, who is now two and a half years old, Elisabeth estimates that she has fed thousands of babies with her breast milk. She virtually spends her whole day pumping the liquid gold, which she then stores in four large freezers in her home, for local mothers who cannot breastfeed their newborns, gay couples and breast milk banks for premature babies. Despite the huge amount of time and the discomfort that goes into pumping the milk, the 29-year-old considers it a “labor of love”.

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A dog shelter in Nikopol, Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Oblast region, recently received a call from a concerned animal lover begging them to help her rescue a dog that had fallen down an exposed drain and had been stuck there for three years.

The shocking story was shared on July 2nd, on a public dog-themed Facebook group, by Elena Omelchenko, a volunteer at the Nikopol dog shelter. Apparently, a girl named Lena called the shelter and practically implored them to rescue a dog that had fallen down an uncovered drain, into a complex central heating system, three years ago, and had been living there ever since. Lena and other kindhearted people had been throwing the dog food, but, so far, they had been unable to rescue it.

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Eclipse, a black Labrador-bull mastiff mix from Seattle, really loves going to the park. So much so that when her owner is too busy to take, or when he’s taking too long, she just leaves the house by herself, gets on the bus and goes to the park by herself.

It all started one day, four years ago, when Eclipse and her master, Jeff Young, were waiting for the D-Line bus at the bus station. The dog knew they were going to the park and she was impatient, so when the public transportation vehicle pulled up and the doors opened, she just jumped right in. Jeff was smoking a cigarette and decided to just wait for the next bus, but Eclipse wouldn’t hear of it, so she ignored his commands to come down. So she just rode the bus by herself and Young caught up with her later, at the park. While impressed with his pet, Jeff Young had no idea that this would eventually become a habit, one that would turn Eclipse into a local celebrity.

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A small dog’s loyalty recently melted the hearts of millions of Koreans, after the media reported that it had been waiting for his owner to return home for three years, not knowing that she never would.

A few years ago, an old lady from Busan, South Korea, adopted a cute little stray dog that she named Fu Shi. The two lived happily for a while, but tragedy struck three years ago, when the old lady suffered brain hemorrhage which eventually led to dementia. She had to be taken to a nursing home to be under constant special care, and the small pooch found itself all alone again. But he had no idea that the old lady was never coming back, so he spent the last three years waiting for her.

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76-year-old Zhang Jiwen is almost completely deaf, but he has two able hands and a strong desire to help those less fortunate. Ever since 2012, he has been carrying building materials up a mountain in Fuling Forest Park, near the city of Chongqing, and building safe walking paths leading up from the modern road at the base all the way to an isolated village near the top. He has already completed a safe path a few hundred meters long and has started work on another leading to the water source of the village.

Zhang grew up in a village in the forests of Fuling, and even though he moved to the big city as an adult, he never forgot about his roots. When he heard about an isolated mountain village whose children had to come down precarious slopes in order to reach their school, he decided that he just had to help. For the past five years he has been taking a bus from his home in Chongqing to Fuling Forest Park to work on a better road for the village located on a mountain there.

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The story of Sindhutai Sapkal is one of incredible determination in the face of adversity, rebirth and love of children who nobody else wanted. The 68-year-old has raised over 1,400 orphans, offering them not just food and shelter, but also the love of a real family. Her amazing work has earned her over 750 awards, and the nickname “Mother of Orphans”.

Sapkal runs four orphanages in her home town of Prune, India’s Maharashtra state – two for girls and two for boys – with the help of her biological daughter, Mamta, and her eldest adopted children, some of whom have become lawyers, doctors and professors. The children under her care were found trying to fend for themselves in railway station, abandoned in dustbins, or even dragged by stray dogs in the streets. New ones are brought to her orphanages all the time, and as long as they are eligible for adoption, she never turns them away. But unlike state-run orphanages, the Mother of Orphans doesn’t give her children up for adoption with other families, and doesn’t turn them away when they turn 18.

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For the last 8 year, about 200 residents of Strunino, a small town in Russia’s Vladimir Oblast region have not had to worry about buying bread, thanks to the generosity of a local grocery store owner who has been giving it away for free.

Mamoud Shavershyan came to Russia, from Armenia, 25 years ago. He worked as an engineer, before setting up his own business, a small grocery store no different than other such stores in Strunino. But everything changed one day, 8 years ago when, sitting behind the counter, Mamoud saw an old lady counting dozens of coins to pay for a couple of loaves of bread. He found it humiliating for the pensioner and ended up giving her the bread for free. That day, he made the decision to print coupons that pensioners in Strunino could exchange for white or black bread at his store. To make sure that people knew about his offer he advertised it a local paper.

But that was only the beginning. Soon, Mamoud extended his generous offer to people with disabilities, large families with low income, and the generally poor. News spread like wildfire, and soon poor people from neighboring villages started coming by his shop to receive coupons. Today, the “Eric” grocery store in Strunino gives away around 2,000 loaves of white bread and 1,000 loaves of black bread, every month. They also regularly donate gingerbread to local kindergartens, and to coupon holders during holidays. And for their kindness, Mamoud and his family are “rewarded” with insults, racial slurs and accusations of theft…

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69-year-old Julieta Lorenzo, a frail old lady in the Philippines, has recently melted the hearts of thousands around the archipelago after photos of her carrying her 30-year-old disabled daughter to the bank to collect her pension went viral online.

The heartwarming photos were snapped by Facebook user Gilbred Cargason Alsagon Jr, who was at a branch of the Development Bank in the city of Roxas when Julieta and her daughter walked in. The sight of a small 69-year-old woman hunched over with a full grown woman on her back made a big impression on everyone present, Alsagon reported, but even though many offered to help them, the woman politely declined, saying that her daughter, Mary Jane, didn’t trust anyone else to carry her.

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A Buddhist nun has melted the hearts of millions of Chinese after it was revealed that she has adopted and raised over 30 girls abandoned at the gate of her temple over the last 37 years.

Master nun Changmiao, who joined the Buddhist Hailian Temple, in Ningdu, when she was 15 years old, adopted her first daughter in 1980, when she found her abandoned on the side of the road outside her temple. The infant had ants crawling all over her body, and while curious onlookers gathered to see her, none of them were willing to do anything to help. So Changmiao decided to take her in and raise the girl as her own. Little did she know that this was only the first of many daughters, all of them rescued.

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Jordan Kosovich developed leukemia when he was just seven years old. He battled the disease for the next four years, and even though he eventually beat it, the experience took a heavy toll on his social life. Now, the 19-year-old is so desperate to find some friends that he advertised for them on a classifieds website.

The Australian teen from Perth says that leukemia robbed him of a normal childhood. He was forced to quit school for two years until the end of Year 3, while undergoing hellish chemotherapy treatment. When he was finally able to return to school, he became the target of bullies, as the drugs he had taken made him overweight. He describes the whole school experience as “hell” and claims that he wouldn’t go back to it for all the money in the world.

“It’s the worst thing to have happen to you because the drugs they give you are so strong you lose all your hair, and you get really overweight because one of them makes you eat a lot,” Jordan said. “I was too weak to defend myself, being overweight due to the cancer, plus I was a really shy, quiet kid which made me the perfect target.”

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It is very dry in Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park, and the animals there are struggling to find vital water water sources. The bad news is that rain isn’t expected to fall again until November, but the good news is that there are people willing to bring water to the animals by the truckload until that happens.

Patrick Kilonzo Mwalua is the founder of Tsavo Volunteers, a group of animal lovers who look after the vulnerable wildlife of Tsavo National Park. Poachers are generally their biggest problem, but these days, the drought is threatening to kill even more animals . The prolonged drought has made water “a very precious commodity”, and thirsty animals sometimes have to walk long distances to find the few watering holes that haven’t dried up. Due to their scarcity, elephants often fight each other for the right to drink, which leaves the smaller, weaker ones at risk of dying. But Patrick and his team are not about to let that happen.

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