* This story is part of an occasional series following islanders who are living and doing interesting work elsewhere in the world.

For Jim Myers and his family, rescuing and caring for street animals in India is about far more than the animals; It’s about bringing empathy, kindness and meaning to the lives of those involved.

Myers will speak about this humanistic side of rescuing animals at a talk on Vashon next Saturday.

In 2002, Myers, along with his wife, Erika Abrams, and daughter, Claire Abrams-Myers, created Animal Aid Unlimited, an animal rescue center, hospital and sanctuary for street animals in Udaipur, India. Now, 15 years later, the center has become one of the largest of its kind in the country, and its 70 employees and hundreds of volunteers have rescued more than 70,000 animals that were treated and released or, if too injured to return to the streets, live out their lives at the center’s sanctuary.

But perhaps the most interesting part of the center’s success story is how and why it came to be.

Fresh off of a divorce, Myer moved from Southern California to West Seattle in the late 1970s. He was working as a consultant for organizations, helping them with their campaigns to raise money when he met his current wife, Abrams. Soon after they were married, he was offered a job in Australia and lived there with Abrams for six years. They had their daughter and moved back to Seattle in 1992. Myers was then in his early 50s and contemplating an early retirement. He bought a home on Vashon that he intended to use as a retirement home, but then remembered a trip he took to India as a teenager.

“I went there when I was 19 in 1961, and it struck me as one of the strangest countries, but I felt at home,” he recalled in an interview last week. “The space between people and the regard for people and the practice of taking care of each other left an impression on me.”

The family started making semi-regular trips to India, and Myers, who had been an English literature professor in the 1960s and 70s, remembered all of the rights issues of those times.

“Women’s issues, gay issues, black people, gender issues,” he said, “but I had never really looked at animal issues specifically. Animal rights were always in brackets, and it took some time to take those rights out and look at them next to other human issues.”

They became vegetarians and found Udaipur, India, a place Myers described as “lovely. Not too big, not too small.”

“I’ve always had this fantasy that I wanted to live in an otherworldly village in a place like Africa or China or India,” he said.

So with the prospect of retirement approaching and his daughter finishing high school, the family sold their home in West Seattle and moved to India where Myers began contemplating how to have a wholesome retirement.

Myers describes himself as an academic. He holds a doctorate in British Romantic poetry and admits that this background as a thinker led him to something of a crisis.

“There’s a kind of sense of angst and anxiety about wealth and jobs and you start to question ‘Who am I? What am I doing?’ And then you retire and the only decisions you’re making are what golf course to go to or card game to play,” he said. “At the end of the day, I only have this small space around me as the picture I’d like to present to the world. If I’m doing this routinely, every day, I’m doing it not just to save animals, but to save myself.”

The family initially thought of starting an orphanage, but soon realized that there was another problem that was not being addressed anywhere. As they walked through the city, there were street animals that were lying injured on the road or sick and dying in alleyways. When they needed help, there was no service available for the dogs, mules, monkeys and cows that called the streets home. So Myers, his wife and daughter began helping residents conduct basic rescues and perform simple first aid, but they quickly realized the problem was far larger than the part-time help they were offering.

“We felt we had to get all into it or just protect ourselves and not look down the alleyways and see the injured animals,” Myers said. “We didn’t know the language, bureaucracy or culture, but felt this was something no one was handling, and if we did it slowly and carefully we could learn along the way and that it just might work.”

While Western societies see animals as accessories or things that are owned, Myers said Indian culture sees animals differently. There is no culture of adoption and dogs are expected to remain on the streets as they are respected as protectors of the neighborhood, not pets.

“Animal Aid has been an opportunity to move people,” Myers said. “It’s the idea of shifting from the long Western tradition of the animal being an accessory — it’s rights being only the rights of the owner, but never the rights of the animal. We think differently here. It’s all about what they (the animals) want and what they feel.”

With “magnitudes of money and work and labor,” Myers said, the family made a local trust, the Animal Aid charitable trust, and started with a couple of dogs and cows in their care. For the first five years, the rental house on Vashon provided funding for the project. It began to grow and expand and now employs dozens of locals as veterinarians and ambulance drivers and draws hundreds of volunteers from around the world. The family lives full-time in India, and a corner of the center is their home. For them, Animal Aid Unlimited has become far more than a place for ownerless, injured and sick animals. It has become a way to introduce positivity and caring into the world.

“When you’re with the animal with its wounds and its problems, this is an opportunity to really take on the empathy of another living thing,” Myers said in a video on the Animal Aid Unlimited website. “It lifts the empathy of everyone involved. Volunteers can go into the world … and the rest of their lives they’ll be gentler and kinder people to these voiceless creatures.”

Many of the center’s videos about the animals it has rescued have spread far and wide across the Internet and social media due to the seemingly impossible recoveries the animals made. In January, the story of Kalu, a dog who made a full recovery after being found with nearly no face due to a maggot infestation, took the Internet by storm. The YouTube video has more than 11 million views. A glance at the Animal Aid Unlimited website shows much of the same as videos tell stories of animals with seemingly life-ending injuries and diseases — acid attacks, severe mange, deep and open wounds — recovering and being released.

“What we have found time and time again is that even the worst wounds can heal and do heal,” Myers daughter said in a video on the Animal Aid Unlimited website.

Jim Myers will talk about his organization and the “spiritual and humanistic side” of animal rescue at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, June 17, at the Land Trust building on Bank Road.