KempsRidleySeaTurtle_HEART_Allen_Carole_HoustonTX_30January2017_ReelNA.mp3

Carole Allen [00:00:00] And the more I learned, I learned their problem was that they were being drowned in shrimp nets in the Gulf of Mexico. And at their nesting beach, where most of them nest, which is in Mexico, on the northeast beach, on the Gulf, that people were taking all their eggs and eating them and selling them and all that.

Carole Allen [00:00:27] So between the two problems, the eggs being taken, and the turtles, the adults, being drowned in the south of, in the Gulf, we were in dire straits. In about '85, I guess, the number of adult nesters at the beach in Mexico were just in the hundreds. It was very close to being extinct and not having enough turtles to continue the species.

Carole Allen [00:01:04] So probably the greatest thing that I did in all of this is build public awareness, because people did not know about the turtle. They didn't know about the species. They didn't know what trouble it was in. They didn't know what was causing the problem. And so this is really where I started with, with education.

Carole Allen [00:01:34] And children love to raise the money for the turtle food. And this spread to other schools very rapidly because I was a volunteer. The money that was raised bought the food, or bought educational materials, and went directly to saving the turtles. No middlemen, no overhead, nothing. It went directly to the turtles.

Carole Allen [00:02:02] So this got bigger and bigger and bigger. And we, we had, we called any school that raised, you know, maybe $25 they were HEART Council. And I issued homemade nice little certificates. So we got to the point that we had 200 HEART Councils all over the United States and we had one an American school in Saudi Arabia. So that was very interesting.

Carole Allen [00:02:38] And all of this, I have to remind myself, I did not have a computer. All of this, all of the writing, all the letters, everything else was by typewriter. So I'd then get copies made at a store or something. But I did not have the Internet, that I have, you know, today.

Carole Allen [00:03:00] So, over the years, we, we raised, oh, way over $100,000 from donations from individuals and kids and a few companies. We bought the turtle food for way over ten years. We bought ... they needed at the Galveston lab, they needed a P.A. system, an answering machine, electronic scale. We bought that. We raised $40,000 to build a new turtle house down there.

Carole Allen [00:03:40] And, and there, of course, the camp in Mexico received very little money from the Mexican government, the nesting turtle camp down there. So we were able to buy them a generator, four-wheel ATVs, and what else, a Zodiac, oh, a boat and a motor and all sorts of things for them. We also helped a couple of students, one at A&M, at College Station.

Carole Allen [00:04:14] And just worked very hard to get this story into, into the media and into every place that we could get it.