Tiger King star Carole Baskin is saying goodbye to her beloved Big Cat Rescue sanctuary.
Big Cat Rescue introduced its closure in a assertion written by Baskin’s husband, Howard Baskin, final week.
The sanctuary, which has housed injured or orphaned native wild cats for 30 years, stated it’s going to transfer most of its wildlife inhabitants from Tampa, Fla., to the Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas.
Howard wrote that Big Cat Rescue will proceed to fund the care of their animals at Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge till the tip of their lives.
Once the sanctuary’s wild cat inhabitants is transported to Arkansas, Howard claimed they are going to promote the Big Cat Rescue property and use the funds to assist “species-saving projects.”
Alongside a want to direct funds and a spotlight to saving large cats within the wild, the assertion famous it had change into too pricey to care for his or her “increasingly geriatric” inhabitants of 41 cats. Even with a smaller “skeleton staff” working Big Cat Rescue because the COVID-19 pandemic, the overhead value to function the sanctuary runs apparently US$1.5 million per 12 months.
“These are expenses like grounds maintenance, building maintenance, electricity for all the buildings and wells and tiger pool pumps, phones, insurances, technology updates, and equipment maintenance, to name a few,” the assertion reads.
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When Big Cat Rescue had 100 cats, the annual overhead value equated to about $15,000 per animal. Now with solely 41 cats, it reportedly prices the enterprise $36,000 per cat annually.
The assertion claimed the passage of final 12 months’s federal Big Cat Public Safety Act within the U.S. — which Big Cat Rescue staunchly supported — will scale back the necessity for wild cat rescues. The act made it unlawful to privately personal large cat breeds together with lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, jaguars, cougars or any hybrid of such species. The act additionally prohibited cub petting, which sees companies breed child animals for use as picture props by paying prospects.
Howard wrote within the assertion that the purpose of Big Cat Rescue has all the time been “to ‘put ourselves out of business,’ meaning that there would be no big cats in need of rescue and no need for the sanctuary to exist.”
The sanctuary couldn’t in good conscience, nonetheless, keep in operation till its inhabitants dwindled to zero, because the Baskins really feel their funds and sources could possibly be higher allotted to saving wild populations from extinction.
“The win-win solution both for our captive cats and the cats in the wild is for us to merge our cat population with the population at another existing accredited sanctuary and devote the remaining resources of our sanctuary to the ‘in situ’ projects being conducted around the world to avoid extinction,” the assertion reads.
Howard wrote {that a} present enlargement mission at Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge is predicted to be accomplished in six months and can present sufficient area to accommodate Big Cat Rescue’s animals.
Baskin and Big Cat Rescue catapulted into the general public eye three years in the past as a part of Netflix’s Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.
The documentary adopted Joseph Maldonado-Passage, also referred to as “Joe Exotic,” a former Oklahoma zookeeper. He was convicted of attempting to rent somebody to kill Baskin, who had tried to close him down, accusing the Oklahoma zoo of abusing animals and promoting large cat cubs.
In retaliation, Maldonado-Passage raised questions in regards to the disappearance of Baskin’s husband Don Lewis, who vanished mysteriously greater than twenty years in the past. The documentary extensively coated Maldonado-Passage’s repeated accusations that Baskin killed her husband and probably fed him to her tigers. Baskin, who based Big Cat Rescue, has by no means been charged with any crime and launched an announcement refuting the accusations made within the collection.
Maldonado-Passage was resentenced in 2022 to serve 21 years in jail after he begged the court docket for leniency as he started remedy for prostate most cancers.
— With recordsdata from The Associated Press
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