Perspective: The man who rescued the Baghdad Zoo

Left: Lawrence Anthony. Above: Following the invasion, and after the looting of the zoo, only a few animals remained at the Baghdad Zoo. One was Mandor, an emaciated 20-year-old Siberian tiger. The plight of Mandor and 8 more big cats (1 tiger, 7 lions) was grim. The only sustenance they had were weeks-old bones that they gnawed at in an ever-more weakened state.

On March 19, 2003, the United States begins its shock-and-awe campaign, with missiles raining down on Baghdad as the opening salvo of the Iraq war.

Four thousand miles away, at the idyllic Thula Thula Game Preserve in South Africa, wildlife conservationist Lawrence Anthony was following the war on TV.

"I was actually standing outside, looking at a herd of elephants, and it was two o'clock in the morning, and my attention just kept getting pulled back to the TV I'd been watching," Anthony told CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston. "And I thought, I've got to do something. I'm going to do something."

Read the rest at CBS News