Battling “Conservation Greenwashing”

Greenwashing

A little known part of our advocacy work that I don’t recall us ever writing about before is something we refer to as “conservation greenwashing.”

What is it?

The term describes organizations or people whose primary activities in our view are harmful to animals but who try to cloak those activities by falsely spinning conservation as their primary mission. We write about it now because of what we view as a greenwashing effort that we became aware of in just the past few days.

Historically, one of the people most known for this greenwashing in our view was “Doc” Antle, the operator of one of the largest tiger cub petting operations. He set up a nonprofit organization doing business as Rare Species Fund that donated a small portion of its revenue to alleged conservation projects around the world and used this as credentials to assert that he and his organization were devoted to conservation. In 2023 after Antle’s arrest on multiple charges South Carolina suspended the organization’s license.

However, in a roundabout way Antle’s behavior led us to one of our most successful long term conservation partnerships.  A decade ago Antle made a donation to the Corbett Foundation in India who do outstanding work protecting tigers. The donation had a selfish motive - it was related to seeking a permit from USFWS to import or export tigers. When one of the large US based animal welfare organizations explained to Corbett who Antle was, much to their credit, Corbett returned his donation to avoid being associated with him. When it came time in 2016 for us to rescue the tiger named Hoover from Peru, we donated $5000 to Corbett as part of our permit application to reward them for doing what we strongly felt was the “right thing” by returning Antle’s funds. This led to a decade of us raising funds annually each International Tiger Day to support wonderful conservation projects Corbett manages.

The Greenwashing concept was also the basis for our very heavy involvement in the award winning documentary The Conservation Game that exposed the lies of “celebrity conservationists” like Jack Hanna who obtained tiger cubs from horrible breeders and lied about their sources and where the cubs end up on the late night talk shows, and claimed this was all in the name of conservation.

So what happened this week? There is an organization called Feline Conservation Foundation, previously known as Feline Conservation Federation, and originally in 1956 known as the Long Island Ocelot Club. Basically it is a bunch of breeders and owners of exotic cats who for decades have ENCOURAGED ownership of exotic cats as pets.  The FCF were also vocal in their unsuccessful efforts to stop the Big Cat Public Safety Act from passing. This bill ended private ownership of tigers, lions, leopards, jaguars and cougars and stopped the pay to play industry that used their cubs as money making props. But you certainly would not get that impression from their website. It states in the opening paragraph that they have “a mission to advance wild feline conservation.”

How much funding of in situ projects do they do? Their website proudly claims “over the past decade, we have dedicated over $100,000 to these vital initiatives,” i.e., an average of just $10k per year. What are these projects?  Their website names just two., one of which has asked to be removed from their website.

How did this come to our attention recently?

In the last few days FCF sent an email to one of the conservationists we support containing an “MoU” (Memorandum of Understanding) saying that FCF had awarded them a donation of $2500 but requiring a long list of terms, much of which promoting FCF. Then, a second one of our recipients reported a similar letter offering $7500, and then a third reported a similar letter offering $2500. 

Fortunately, each of them reached out to our primary source of project recommendations, Dr. Jim Sanderson, a leading small exotic cat expert, who asked for our input. Each of the conservationists, despite their persistent need of funding, declined the offers from FCF to avoid being associated with them and to avoid having their organizations’ good names be used by FCF to “greenwash” FCFs support of owning exotic cats as pets. 

In order for these wonderful conservation organizations not to suffer from their decisions, in all three cases Big Cat Rescue has sent to them the amount of funding that was offered by FCF. Your donations allow us to provide this kind of support to people around the world working to keep wild exotic cats from going extinct. Thank you! - Howard Baskin