Big Cat Rescue Corp.

In the United States we seek to end private ownership of big cats like many other countries have done, with logical exceptions such as the zoos who meet the standards of accreditation by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). Worldwide we seek to stop the steady dramatic decline in cat populations in order to preserve these apex predator species that are critical to the balance of nature.

Our primary strategy is educating the public with two goals in mind. One is to reduce demand for activities like visiting roadside zoos, cub petting, cub photo ops, and circuses to create an economic basis for the cessation of these activities that drive the mistreatment. The second is grass roots advocacy to encourage people to contact legislators and regulators to change the laws and regulations. We carry out this education through personal guided tours of the sanctuary, a virtual tour app for iPhone and Android,and through outreach (but never taking wild animals offsite) and through our online website, social sites including Facebook and YouTube, a online course we offer at nominal cost at ZooCollege.com and 9 live webcams on the sanctuary grounds that can be viewed at Explore.org.

We have the volunteer force necessary to give the daily educational tours and have a full time Director of Outreach who arranges for outreach programs. We have a two full time people dedicated to our videos which have received over 240 million views and to answering questions on our social sites. We have more than 2.2 million Facebook followers and interact with them daily on big cat issues. Our website gets 3.5 million unique visitors per year and has over 10,000 pages of educational content that explains why wild animals belong in the wild and not in our homes and back yard cages.

In 2003 the Captive Wildlife Safety Act (CWSA) that we supported made it illegal to sell a big cat across state lines. This partial solution resulted in a drop in requests we receive to take in cats. The Big Cat Public Safety Act is the rest of the legislative solution, closing what have turned out to be loopholes in the CWSA, ending pet ownership and cub petting, and insuring that breeding is truly for conservation purposes. It was first introduced in 2012 and through our efforts along with a coalition of other animal welfare organizations has steadily built momentum each session, which is the normal path for a bill that after multiple sessions passes. Meantime, numerous states of have passed bans or partial bans on the private possession of big cats.

Our direct action against offsite cub petting and exhibition has been very successful in getting venues to either cancel or agree to no longer allow cub petting or exhibition of big cats. These include the owners of over 200 shopping malls, numerous restaurants, and some large companies like Citigroup and Porsche.

What is next is clear: continued work to pass the Big Cat Public Safety Act while continuing our education efforts to reduce demand for cub petting and exhibition and to foster true concern for conservation in the wild.