The Cutest Rehab

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This video is funny and sweet. It restores my faith in human beings. Even Amy Winehouse would love it. Maybe.

Produced by Bluevoice, it shows a bunch of volunteers from Orca, a Peruvian nonprofit, as they rescue and rehabilitate sea lion and fur seal pups orphaned by fishing nets and disease.

Part of the rehab involves the volunteers releasing their inner sea lions. You know, barking, socializing, and climbing all over each other, just like pinnipeds do.

The heroic part: these volunteers work in the seriously cold waters of the Peru Current. They have no money for wetsuits and tough it out for hours in soggy jeans.

Bluevoice is trying to raise the money to test tissue samples and figure out why all the seal mothers are dying.

(First seen on my secret addiction, the antidote to bad news, CuteOverload.)

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones’ environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the Kiriyama Prize and the John Burroughs Medal Award.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

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