60 Minutes - 07/14/2024: Rise and Modern Ark

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

As Ukrainian families grieve the losses of their loved ones in Russia’s continued conflict, correspondent Scott Pelley joins a group of widows and children of the war on a mountain climb in the Austrian Alps, a journey of recovery and resilience. Pat Craig, founder of The Wild Animal Sanctuary in Colorado, has emerged as the go-to guy for orchestrating high-stakes animal rescues around the world. Jon Wertheim reports on Craig’s most ambitious mission yet. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and

terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Meet Nathan Schmidt's Camp of Climbers. Their mothers are widows of the war in Ukraine, who gambled that a week of challenge in the Alps could mend their broken hearts. You can't hear the sounds of war here. You just close your eyes and you feel like you could fly. 60 Minutes has discovered tigers roaming in the wilds of Colorado?

And elephants in Georgia? How or why did these animals end up here? Meet the modern-day Noah, who looks out for nature's greatest beasts during their greatest times of need. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. greatest beasts during their greatest times of need. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper.

I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories in a moment, but we begin with the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Tonight, former President Trump is preparing for the Republican National Convention one day after being grazed by a high-velocity rifle bullet that very nearly killed him. One spectator was killed yesterday at the Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Two others have been in critical condition. Officials say the would-be assassin was 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Pennsylvania.

Mr. Trump and President Biden have spoken by phone, and in a statement today, Mr. Trump said, it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable. Mr. Trump appeared briefly just after midnight this morning, arriving in New Jersey six hours after he was shot. Hello, Butler, and hello to Pennsylvania. I'm thrilled to be back. Yesterday, Mr. Trump was minutes into the rally when he referred to an immigration chart on a big screen. If you want to really see something that said, take a look at what happened.

There were between six and eight shots. An image by New York Times photographer Doug Mills appears to show a metallic streak behind Mr. Trump's head as he raises his hand to his ear. Officials say Thomas Crooks fired from this roof 400 feet from the stage. He was killed immediately by a Secret Service sniper. Crooks has no record and left no obvious clue to his motive. This afternoon, President Biden said he had a short, respectful call with Mr. Trump last night,

and this evening, Mr. Biden will speak from the Oval Office. Thank you very much. Tonight, Republicans are gathering in Milwaukee for their national convention. Thursday, President Trump is expected to accept the nomination for the third time. A bus filled with widows of war and their children left Ukraine bound for the Austrian Alps. They'd been invited to a charity summer camp hosted by Nathan Schmidt, an American Marine who knows all too well the bereavement of war. As we first told you last fall, mountain climbing was Schmidt's path to recovery from three combat tours in Iraq. And so, when Vladimir Putin launched his attack on an innocent people, Schmidt offered Ukraine what seemed like an impossible hope, that in only six days in the Alps, he could teach grieving families to rise.

The journey to an Austrian hotel ended at three in the morning after 45 hours on the road. So the trip already felt like a mistake to widows who packed enough skepticism to last the week. Their husbands died defending Ukraine among the tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers killed. Time stopped for Natalia Zaremba and her two young boys. She told us, I think they still don't believe what happened. Just like me, they're still waiting for daddy to come home from work. For daddy to fly home to eight-year-old Ilya and five-year-old Andrey, who imagined mastering the air like their dad. Mikhailo Zaremba was a Navy pilot, shot down May 2022 in the unprovoked invasion of his home.

He loved Ukraine, so he gave his life for Ukraine. What is your hope for this trip? I want to find strength for myself to be able to bring my children up, to bring our children up. I want to find the strength to not let my husband down and to give our children a good future. Thirteen widows and 20 children had come to Austria from Mikolajv, a city bombed by the Russians for 260 days. The bereaved families traveled 1,300 miles on faith to meet a stranger still struggling to heal

from his own war. Slava Ukrania! Glory to Ukraine! Glory to Ukraine! Glory to Ukraine! Glory to Ukraine! Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Lord! Nathan Schmidt, Naval Academy graduate, Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve,

led shouts of glory to Ukraine at the third summer camp hosted by his small charity, the Mountain Seed Foundation. It comes from the Bible. It was, you know, with faith the size of a mustard seed, one can move mountains. We're not a religious organization, but that faith, that faith in something bigger, that faith in self, and if you can reinforce that faith,

we and you can move mountains. What do you hope these families have when they return to Ukraine? We teach about the significance of the rope in mountaineering. The rope signifies community, it signifies team. You're never alone on the rope. It also signifies courage. Because when you're on the rope, that means you're climbing a mountain. And courage doesn't mean that you're not afraid. It actually means that

you are afraid and you're going to overcome that fear. There would be plenty of fear to overcome because ultimately this was his goal, to lead children on the last leg of a climb to the peak of Mount Kitschsteinhorn at more than 10,000 feet. The first steps to the summit began with training for the kids, ages 5 to 17. For their moms, there were daily group therapy sessions, and every day of the camp would raise the challenge for both.

We're going to trust ourselves, the main thing. We're going to trust our equipment, and we're going to trust the team that we're with. The team of professional guides and other volunteers included Dan Knosson. Knosson was Schmidt's Naval Academy classmate. As a Navy SEAL in 2009, he lost his legs in Afghanistan. He's a three-time Paralympian,

but he'd never climbed since his injury. The first days of training looked dangerous. No! Stop! Stop! But there was always an expert on the rope. No? That's a little late. One professional guide for every four children who ease the tension slowly for kids including 14-year-old Miroslav Kupchenkov.

Now just lean back. Lean back, totally trust. No. Lean back. You can't. You can't. I can't. You can't.

I can't. Of course you can. Miroslav, his adult sister, and their mother, Natalia, lost Oleksandr Kupchenkov, a 53-year-old career soldier. Natalia told us, he was the man I wanted to spend my whole life with. He was the best at everything. Wonderful husband, wonderful dad.

People loved him. Kupchenkov was hit by a Russian missile March 2022 as he was running ammunition to his pinned-down soldiers. Miroslav told us, every day he showed me how to be a good person, and he was always brave. He would never go back, only forward. And Miroslav discovered, in repelling, going back is going forward. And terror was just one step before triumph. That's it. There you go. Super. As the children learned the ropes, the moms seemed to be near the end of theirs. It will be hard for you to hear this.

They were led by clinical psychologist Amit Oren, with translation by Irena Prihochko, the charity's Ukrainian co-founder. Amit Orin is an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine. The way I approach this group of people is not in looking at their trauma. It's in looking at their strengths. And what strengths are you finding? Capacity for love. Honesty. These are the strengths that they're finding.

All I do is take a flashlight, illuminate inside them, and let them see and remember who they are. But Svetlana Milinchuk, on the left, didn't see the light. She didn't believe in breakthroughs. She brought her daughter Miroslava while her adult daughter stayed home. Svetlana lost her husband, Yuri, a civilian building inspector who volunteered the day after Putin invaded. Svetlana mixed homemade explosives for the troops as her husband sent text messages from the front. Svetlana told us,

Pictures started coming in. Good morning, darling, with a photo of a flower taken right from the trench. It was spring already, right from the trench. The photos thrilled her, because Yuri had always worked too much at the expense of the family, she thought. But after the invasion, family was all he cared about. His revelation lifted their lives. Then he was dead.

And her rage is almost like blindness. I became very distant and angry and I kept all the sorrow inside. I didn't share it. Nathan Schmidt was keeping his sorrow inside when, in 2019, a friend invited him on a climbing trip. Schmidt wasn't a mountaineer. He's afraid of heights. To him, the idea sounded so difficult and frightening.

It might just have the force to break his grief. Yeah. You know, I spent the Naval Academy preparing myself for war, and nothing can prepare yourself for war. In 2004, Schmidt was a 24-year-old first lieutenant who dreamed of leading Marines. He landed in Fallujah on the eve of the bloodiest battle of the entire Iraq War. Two weeks after arriving at Camp Fallujah, I lost my teacher, who was a mentor of mine at the Naval Academy.

Killed? Yeah. The rocket struck the office. I was the second one in the room. And it was the first time I had ever seen anyone die in such a way. And it was my teacher. And that established a crack in me that had to be healed in another way that took years and years to heal. The problem was that that was the first of many cracks.

I lost one of our Marines that was in my unit a month later. I then had my friend lose his leg. I took over his team. A few days after that, I lost my analyst in the gun turret of our vehicle. By the end of November, the unit that I was with, which is a great unit, 3-1, was combat ineffective. We had lost over 20% of our unit, either injured or killed. And that was his first tour. He fought in Iraq for three years.

Who were you after that third tour? I thought in my mind that I was the strongest, but in reality I was the weakest. I was strong physically. I could do as many pull-ups as you asked me to do. I could run, but I was broke. And, you know, those cracks, they take a lifetime to heal. You spend this week doing what you can to heal these families. And I wonder how much of that is healing you. Heh. Heh. Heh. It's huge.

This program... Heh. Has healed me in ways I... can't even describe, and I feel sometimes I get selfish. But you're right. You're right. It works. And I'm not sure why.

Maybe it works, because the children and mothers who arrived on the bus will not be the same people who return to Ukraine. No one's quite the same after scaling a wall like this. When we come back, teaching the bereaved to rise. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling.

History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Nathan Schmidt's week-long summer camp for bereaved Ukrainian children and their mothers began with training in the Austrian Alps. Then serious work began, the kind of challenge that might rise to a revelation.

The Hohe Thuan National Park embraces some of the highest peaks in the Austrian Alps and a feat of engineering. The Muserboden Dam would be the first big challenge for the 13 widows and their 20 children. A zipline flew them to the concrete face, where they found a steel cable to clip their harnesses to. Footholds were set across the span about two and a half football fields wide. The children and moms literally could not fall, and yet the Muser-Boden Dam remained 32 stories of doubt. Natalia Zaremba did not like the measure of it. The Russians had killed her husband, the father of her two boys.

Was this risk foolish? Why do you put them on this dam? We put them on this dam because we want them to confront discomfort. We want them to confront their fears. Nathan Schmidt co-founded the Mountain Seed Foundation charity. We met in the 700 square mile park where the dam, finished after World War II, is a tourist attraction for rock climbers. What makes this safe in your view? First off, we have professional mountain guides. The second thing is all the equipment that we have. They train throughout the week on it. They know how to use the equipment.

And then particularly the little children, they are also short-roped into a guide. So there's multiple layers of security for them. And so with all that security, the challenge was not so much under their feet as under their skin. Help me. Yep, and here we go. Miroslav Kukchenkov, who told us his late father never went back, always forward, was following his father's lead.

You know, in life, sometimes the thing that gets you through a difficult point is knowing that you've already done something more difficult. What difference do you see in them when they reach the top? The sheer look of joy on their faces. It's hard to even comprehend and we know that that will be a strong point for them when they go back to Ukraine. They will know that they've conquered this wall, and they've conquered their own fears. Fears conquered by Natalia Zaremba, who at the end of the climb was walking on air. Yeah! She told us she came to Austria to find strength to raise her boys alone.

Nice! She said, it was something incredible. As soon as I stepped on the ground, the children ran to me, hugged me. There were no flowers there, so my older son gave me a branch from a bush. You know, I see you smiling, and I suspect there hasn't been a lot of that. I don't feel joy the way I used to. Wherever I am, no matter how good a time I'm having, it's hard knowing my husband could

have been with us, but he's not. And even when I smile, the pain in my heart is very strong. The pain is strong, but maybe not invincible. Natalia was listening at the meetings, and words of inspiration, like those of Navy SEAL Dan Conosin, were getting through. That bomb in Afghanistan took my legs, and I can't change that fact. But ultimately, it has to be up to me to decide if it's going to take the rest of my life too. Thank you all very much. Still, for others, especially Svetlana Malinchuk, words fell short.

She had told us her husband sent photos of flowers from his trench until the Russians killed him. She said, Life is a book that you read your whole life. When my husband died, I stopped turning the pages in the book. But opening a new chapter is what clinical psychologist Amit Oran had in mind. And so she took the widows to a storybook castle where she hoped to scale the walls of Svetlana Malenchuk. And I started to talk with her about castle walls. that we're going to see a castle where there are always very deep, tough, impenetrable walls,

and that I thought that her face looked like that, that it was hard to see what's inside, like this castle. And I brought them to a wall, a side wall of the castle, where there are teeny tiny windows. And I said to them, right now I think you're here at the bottom, and as you go up, you're able then to see three windows. I said, unless you open that window, you can't peer out and see the beauty around you.

You're trapped. And ultimately what happened is several of the women stood there on the grass and opened up to each other. She was one of them. It was choking you. It was choking you. The next day, after the group session, Svetlana had been thinking. She came up to me and said to me, it was a very painful conversation we had, and I made a decision.

My anger was choking me, and I decided to let it go so I can breathe. Congratulations. You've done hard work. I'm so happy for you. She has a long way to go, but she's understood that it's a choice at least. The few things she can control in this world is how open or close she chooses to be in her own castle. You know as you talk to the mothers, none of them expected what happened in February of 2022. The invasion. Losing their homes in many cases, losing their future, or at least their future being unknown. And it's one of those moments in climbing where you look all around and you don't know where you're going to put your hand,

and you don't know where you're going to put your foot. You don't know if you're going to be able to stay in that position or fall. This program is meant to show them the footholds and the handholds, to fill the cracks that they have too, and then lead their children back up the mountain. On day five, one mountain remained. Nathan Schmidt took the first steps from a high tram station on an ascent to the peak of Mount Kitschteinhorn. It was a steep and icy 570 feet to the ultimate test of the camp.

Like the dam earlier, there was a fixed cable to hook onto. But like the dam, glancing down looked fatal, and looking up, a cold, thin glare exposed hours of struggle. We followed Schmidt's lead and remembered what he told us about the rope we were on and its three lessons, community, courage. And the last thing is responsibility. And this is probably the most difficult one. And that is when you're on the rope, you're responsible for those that are on the rope with you. When they're weak, you pull them up. When they are showing signs of fatigue, you encourage them.

Look at me, Iman. Breathe in. Two, three, four, hold. Two, three, four. We hope that when they go home, that they build their own communities, they add people to their rope, that they encourage them to face their fears and have courage. Courage lifted them 10,508 feet. A summit reached by everyone. Let's go, Dan! Including

Nathan Schmidt's Naval Academy classmate, Dan Knosson, on his prosthetics. It was tough, but I'm happy to make it to the top, and it was great to do it with everyone. Seeing the kids climbing gave me a lot of inspiration to keep pushing. Natalia Zaremba's kids pushed to the top.

She had come to Austria to find strength within herself, but from the peak, she could see where that kind of strength truly comes from. We have something that bonds us more now, some new achievements which we experienced together and that taught us to be braver and stay together, because only together can we overcome this. Our strength, she said, will be from being together. Also among the climbers at the summit was Miroslav Kupchenkov, who told us now he could do anything.

What is your hope for them? My hope for them is that they can remember the achievement that they've had, and I also hope they can remember the stillness and the peace of these mountains. You can't hear the sounds of war here. You just close your eyes and you feel like you can fly. Even Svetlana Malinchuk took flight, rising to the summit and, at last, to the high, open windows of her castle.

I was screaming. To be honest, I was simply screaming. Having breathed in full lungs of air, I was screaming with my head up toward, I don't know, God? Nature? I don't know. I was just getting rid of all the negative. Has this helped you in some small way to heal? Oh, well, at least I managed to open the bag of my sorrows. To open their sorrows to the sky. Five days before, they clipped to a rope

a string of broken souls. Now, they would return to the war, but this time, resurrected in strength and love and invincible hope. And lo, before the flood, the Lord said to Noah, make yourself an ark, bring out every kind of living creature. That was the Old Testament. But what happens today when disaster threatens animals? A powerful force, a zoo, a foreign government, even the U.S. Department of Justice, often calls from on high and enlists the services of one man,

Pat Craig, founder of the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Colorado. As we first reported in January, Craig has emerged as the go-to guy for orchestrating high-stakes rescues around the world. We accompanied this modern-day Noah to a zoo in Puerto Rico for his most ambitious mission yet. These lions were once literally the pride of Puerto Rico, housed at the Dr. Juane Rivera Zoo in the coastal town of Mayaguez, the only zoo on the island. But after years of decline, mismanagement, and neglect, this was the tableau that greeted Pat Craig and his wife Monica

when they arrived here from Colorado. What was your impression when you got to the zoo for the first time? The animals were very, very sad-looking, and some of them were very, very sick. I felt physically and emotionally overwhelmed. And even while we were there, animals died almost on a weekly basis. Correct. So that felt even worse because we're present, and yet we were there too late.

Over the course of a decade, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cited the zoo two dozen times for substandard conditions and animal mistreatment. After Hurricanes Irma and Maria ravaged the island, the zoo closed to the public in 2018. For the more than 300 winged, scaled, and four-legged residents still captive, the situation turned from bad to downright desperate. We saw a zebra that had a horrible wound on her leg and her tail, and she couldn't stand up. We saw a pig that had a horrible wound on her leg and her tail, and she couldn't stand up.

We saw a pig that had a skin condition. Her skin was just falling apart. A mountain lion's untreated cancer had been allowed to spread all over its body. Seeing the mountain lion suffering the way that he was, that broke my heart. And not being able to... Sorry. Yeah, help him. Yeah. It was just so evident that this facility was way beyond repairing.

The U.S. Department of Justice, which enforces federal animal welfare laws in the states and Puerto Rico, agreed. And in February of last year, staged an extraordinary intervention, sending a battalion of agents to the zoo to evacuate every single species to permanent homes on the mainland. To lead this mission, to captain this ark as it were, the DOJ tapped wild animal sanctuary founder Pat Craig. We were there to witness the operation. Equal parts military-style logistics and battlefield extraction. Among the targets, seven lions sweltering in a concrete bunker. And they never hooked up the power after the hurricane. They never hooked up the power to the zoo.

Wait, wait. There's a zoo that's functioning with animals there, and there's no power? There's no power. And then if you look at the pictures from the inside of their building, you know, it's the old steel bars, just like jail cells, all in a row. When it came time to coax the cats out of their cages, Craig entered the lion's den. At Gather the Lions, we're necessarily happy to see you and go with you. What happened? They're definitely defensive because they don't know who we are and what we're doing and why.

And so we show up and we're like, believe me, you've got to trust me. We're trying to help you here. Well, sweet talking didn't work. So they deployed plan B, sedation. Hard to watch, but accepted practice when rescuing uncooperative carnivores. Over the course of five months, Craig and his team of 20 used patience,

prodding, pursuit, and grape jelly to lure each animal into its custom-built crate. A camel. A kangaroo. A rhinoceros. These stubborn hippos. Monica Craig, a native Spanish speaker, had hoped to coordinate with the local staff. But the team from Colorado mostly had to go it alone. She says the zookeepers in Puerto Rico often refuse to help.

We tried many, many days to communicate with them and try to tell them, hey, we're not bad people. We're just trying to do what we're supposed to be doing for these animals and give them a better home. What was the response to that? They were upset. They were like, no, I don't think that's right. The animals belong here. It was a sentiment shared by many in the community,

and at times resistance curdled into outright sabotage. The rescue team had nearly wrangled Mundi, once a star attraction, into her transport crate, when suddenly... Out of nowhere, this elephant just flies up, tears out of there, starts running around. What do you think happened? Well, I think somebody shot her with a BB gun, if you ask me.

And hit her in the rear end. Hit her in the rear end just to make her hate that crate. Yeah. Now she thinks that crate did something to her. We reached out to Puerto Rico's Department of Natural and Environmental Resources, which is responsible for the zoo. In a statement, it said the animals were provided with comprehensive care and denied there was any neglect,

blaming problems at the zoo on hurricane damage, limited resources, and aging animals. Once the transport was finally ready, a police escort to the airport. Then the animals were loaded, one by one, onto charter flights bound for new homes Craig had arranged at sanctuaries across the U.S. How do you ferry to safety an 8,000-pound elephant like Mundi? On a 747 cargo jet, of course. De Parker brought a sigh of relief. When she took off, I cried because I said, thank you, God. She's in. It's over. She's out of here.

There's no question about it anymore. Pat and Monica Craig took as many of the rescues as they could back to their 1,200-acre facility. A vast menagerie roams the grassy enclosures on the high plains of eastern Colorado. Each of the 700-plus animals here came with a sad backstory, wagging their own tales of woe, as it were. Tigers kept in garages as pets. Lions saved from a zoo in war-torn Ukraine. Bears abused at a Korean medical facility. Now 64, Craig got the idea for the place as a teenager in the 1970s,

when a friend who worked at a zoo gave him a tour behind the scenes. There were all these animals, lions and tigers, that were in small cages, and he said, these will be euthanized. And I thought, wow, this is crazy, you know. these are healthy and they're not old they're not sick. Craig decided right then and there to open his own sanctuary on his parents small Colorado farm. With few regulations to guide him he built the animal enclosures himself and scoured biology books for pointers. Did you have any experience with lions and tigers? No, none. Did you have a degree in zoology? No, I was just starting college back then. It was going to be a

business degree. And he quickly learned that lions and tigers are no house cats. In the early years, I was in the hospital more times than you could count. It was like, okay, don't do that again. And, you know, just so all those years of making mistakes and not getting killed. What specifically does a mistake look like? Pretty bad. I've had my left arm almost completely torn off. I've had bit through the chest and collapsed lungs. The animals Craig can handle, but on his missions to hostile environments around the world, it's the people he often needs extra help managing. Heavily armed federal marshals accompanied Craig when the Department of Justice dispatched him to retrieve maltreated big cats that had been kept

by the notorious Tiger King, Joe Exotic, the unlikely Netflix sensation, and his associates. These two were among the 141 animals Craig liberated and brought back here. What kind of conditions was Joe Exotic keeping these guys in in Oklahoma? Well, you know, it was just all these really small cages that were just in line after line because it was a gigantic breeding operation primarily.

Let's go. The rescue missions and the sanctuary operate on an annual budget of $34 million. Funding comes mostly from private donations. When animals arrive here, this is often their first stop, designed to minimize shock by mimicking the conditions they came from. Here, they're evaluated and given a treatment plan, whether it's medication or emergency surgery. Craig and staff veterinarian Dr. Michaela Vedders

introduced us to Chad and Malawi, both rescued from Puerto Rico. How confident do we feel about our locks here? Confident. This guy wants to get out. She says, yeah. This guy's ready to hang out with us. They suffer from permanent neurological damage, likely caused by malnutrition, something Craig could spot just by looking. You see how she keeps doing that? Yeah, she just different angle. But really, she just doesn't have a control over it. Head tilting at an angle. Yeah. We've had literally hundreds of lions that have come through that have had that kind of problem.

You've seen this before? Oh, yeah. The sanctuary devises a special diet for each animal, which requires 100,000 pounds of food per week, mainly donated by nearby Walmarts, occasional cupcakes included. When we met him, Mikey the Bear, another asylum seeker from Puerto Rico, was midway through his rehab.

Right now, he's in his lockout, just so we can medically manage him. What did you see the first time you saw him? He was in a great deal of pain, very gingerly moving. We assume he's got, you know, a great deal of arthritis, which we've moving. We assume he's got a great deal of arthritis, which we've provided medications for, and now he's getting around almost like a young bear. Nursing animals like Mikey back to physical health

is one thing. Ministering to their emotional wounds is often a bigger challenge. Having been raised in captivity, many of the animals arrive with what amounts to severe PTSD. And they must be taught to trust the humans caring for them. They're already mad at people anyway because of whatever people had done. I had one tiger years ago that anytime you came near,

he'd want to hit the fence and kill you. What's the time table for trying to ease some of the trauma these animals have been through? You know, some were beaten, some were starved, some were mentally tormented to a degree, you know, and so every case is different. So some of them will do it in a matter of days, some will be in a few weeks. Doesn't that story imply, however traumatic this may have been, it's not irreversible? It's not irreversible. The goal of all this rehab is to get these wild animals to act the part.

Remember Mundi? At the zoo, she had zero contact with other elephants for more than 30 years. We accompanied Craig on a visit to a refuge in Georgia where he placed Mundi under the care of conservationist Carol Buckley. This marked the first time Craig and the elephant had seen each other since Puerto Rico. What do you notice? Well, first thing, she just looks so much healthier. And just her demeanor is so much calmer and nicer. Every day when I would go see her in the zoo, I just, God, I would just hurt.

And then now to see this is just amazing. Just truly amazing. Hey, pretty lady. Buckley provides the care and feeding, but happily admits Mundi's real mentors are the other elephants here. You're just the innkeeper. You're just the chef. Hey, I just open and close doors and make sure the waters are running, you know. And the other elephant knows what they need to learn, and they're instructing them. It's fantastic. It is exactly the same as what happens in the wild.

That's the same principle Craig employs at his sanctuary. And after two months of rehab, the lions from Puerto Rico were ready to enter their permanent habitat. All right, Robert's going to open the door. We were on hand for the release. No one quite knew what to expect, not least the lions. You can go, yeah. The first was reticent.

But one by one... This must just be literally life-changing. They started to venture out, enclosed for their safety and ours, but otherwise in a vast ocean of green. These guys have been in captivity their whole lives. This is the first. Yeah, this will be the first time ever that they've been able to either run or live in a big space like this, even have deep grass. Makes you feel good? Yeah, absolutely.

This is why we do this. There were a few scuffles, but for Pat Craig, that's exactly what he'd hoped for. Lions acting like, well, lions. The animals come to this sanctuary from all over the world, but in this unlikely setting, here silhouetted by the Rockies in eastern Colorado, they find more than just sanctuary. They finally find a home. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.