Guideposts Love Dem Cats ' Doug Snyder, one of 4 Feline Fanatics, created a lovely profile of the Big Cat Rescue, located in Tampa, FL, after visiting the sanctuary several times. Doug wrote:
Although I had visited the Big Cat Rescue three times, I never knew the unbelievable background and origin of the place. Meeting Carole Baskin, the founder and CEO, was a real pleasure. She was such a tender soul that I knew right away the cats were in great hands.I was amazed as Doug was, when I read the story of the founding of Big Cat Rescue. I could easily spend hours just exploring this web site, which features cats from the 16 wild species rescued (including a rare Pallas cat, and Sand cats, native to Africa and the Middle East), articles on endangered big cats, and tons of other content. Big Cat Rescue has several "matching funds" donors, and your donations are welcome to help maintain this superb sanctuary for the world's endangered cats of the wild.
Carole and her late husband started the Big Cat Rescue out of the goodness of their hearts. It was through their discovery of the horrific practices of bobcat and lynx fur farms that they knew they had to do something.
Comments
Interesting!
I had no idea there were fur farms for lynx and other big cats in the United States…I’m so saddened and disappointed by this.
I wish I knew about this place before I went to Tampa last summer…I’d have loved to visited!
I know Carol and her husband personally, and these two are the most dedicated and wonderful people I have ever met. They do a beautiful job of caring for and giving a forever home to animals that should have been left in the wilds. They also take excellent care of animals that can’t be returned to the great outdoors due to injuries or such. I have been to many of their fundraisers, and have visited the rescue itself, and again I am so impressed with what they do I can’t say how wonderful I think they are enough times… I love cats (I have 18), but the big cats are really my heart, and to know that there is somewhere for some of them to go that they are safe at makes my day!!
This is a must see place when near Tampa. If every child/teenager could be educated in the care of God’s creatures perhaps there would be less suffering.
Carole Baskin is unethical, cruel and ignorant to Wildlife rehab. She is not a protector of animal life as she determines who has a right to life at her center. She is unnecessarily torturing, killing and feeding live domestic rabbits to her big cats. She is a disgrace to any professional wildlife rehab and a disgrace to any sanctuary and should be punished by Florida laws just as any person who is convicted for animal abuse. The Wildlife Education and Rehabilitation Center provides guidelines for rehabbing bobcats in Florida which advise feeding live prey it may encounter in its natural habitat. Domestic rabbits do not live in the wild. Her staff workers proudly take videos of throwing live domestic rabbits to cat pens while smiling, proudly take and display photos of workers holding dead or wounded rabbits that are brutally covered in blood and post them on facebook and youtube. Please call the USDA, ASPCA, HUMANE SOCIETY and all org’s who investigate animal abuse and file a complaint to stop this practice and ask that cruelty laws honored. These rabbits should be removed from this facility immediately. The info above is all over the internet, the workers in the photos are also shown as volunteers on her website.
Big Cat Rescue ( Carole Baskin ) is currently under Investigation for Animal Cruelty with FWC & USDA: for unnecessarily feeding live domestic rabbits to Bobcats, torturing and killing domestic rabbits for feeding other Big Cats, illegally bringing 3 Bobcats into the state of Florida, and for the death of the 3 Bobcats. Not only were hundreds of domestic rabbits unnecessarily tortured and killed at BCR because Bobcats do Not need taught to hunt, the Bobcats were never releasable in the state of Florida or Alabama from the beginning, and the public was intentionally deceived (fraud). Call or email Captain Marlow for details: Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, 850-410-0656 Ext. 17106, jason.marlow@myfwc.com.
The bobcats were not rehabbing but 3 yr. old residents of BCR according to BCR newsletters about Moses and Bailey.