Metallica Rocks Hunger By Collecting 9 Tons of Food for Kids and Animals in Colombia

It always seems like fans and artists in the heavy metal genre – and generally any kind music that tends to inspire mosh pits – have a bad rep for being scary and tough. But we say that looks can be deceiving. Would the members of Slayer go out of their way to rescue a little kitten from the freezing cold if they were scary bad guys? We don’t think so. How about a punk fan clearing out a mosh pit to make room for a mama duck and her babies? Nah. These guys may look tough, but they’re cool in our books.

But you know what’s not cool? Being hungry. We aren’t talking about the days where you’re so busy that you don’t have the chance to grab more than a bite, so by the time you do sit down to eat, you feel positively ravenous. It can be tough for those of us who have grown up with an abundance of food to imagine what it truly feels like to go hungry. But in countries like Colombia, about 4,770 children of the indigenous Wayuú community have died of starvation in the past eight years. When we break the numbers down, this means that one to two children are dying of hunger each week. So, when the Colombian-based METALLICA fangroup The Lords of Hardwire brought this problem to the band’s attention prior to their November 1st concert in Bogota, the thrash metal band did something truly hardcore: they asked fans to Donate non-perishable food items to help feed hungry humans and animals. And oh, did the fans deliver.

A total of over nine tons of non-perishable food and other items were donated by the concert’s 25,00 fans and given to Challenger Foundation. If that wasn’t awesome enough, a portion of the donations also went to Corazones Peluditos (which translates to “Furry Hearts”), a Colombia-based organization of 40 families who feed, foster, and re-home abandoned animals. We love that not only did METALLICA open their hearts to the indigenous Wayuú community, they opened their hearts to homeless animals as well.

To learn more the problems facing the Wayuú community in Colombia, watch the documentary El Rio Que Nos Robaron.

Lead image source: Consequence of Sound