Tropical Storm Hermine has dumped many inches of water on us and is still bombarding the sanctuary w/ rain. All of the cats are locked in their roofed sections even though the winds aren’t bad, because the ground is so soaked that trees could start falling. The Texas Tigers moved home yesterday from Vacation, so don’t be worried when you see it under water on the live webcam.
All of the cats have high, dry dens, but a lot of them are refusing to eat today. We feed every day, which isn’t common in the industry. Most places fast their cats 1 or 2 days a week, but ours are so old, we offer food every day. When the weather is awful some cats will chose to skip a meal rather than get wet coming into their lockouts. A lot of the cats are on meds for their old age related issues, so the keepers have to use VERY long sticks to offer the pill filled treat to the cat, inside their den.
Yesterday we posted a link to what we do in bad weather and this morning I did an hour and a half LIVE Facebook walkabout to show everyone that the cats are staying cozy. Afton did a pretty fun video about dealing with the rain that will be uploaded to YouTube.com/BigCatRescue tomorrow.
Kittens did not come to the Kitten Cabana today due to the rain. Jamie finished the quarterly Big Cat Times today, so we will be proofing it and then sending it off for printing.
Yesterday was the last day to weigh in asking USDA to ban cub pimping. Their online site says they got 6,149 comments. We know that the Big Cat Coalition sent in 125,000 + but USDA and other government agencies like to pretend that any form letter only counts as one, even if 125,000 people thought it was important enough to send. That’s why it is so important that you edit the headline and text whenever we try to make it easy for you with a form letter. On this USDA issue, we didn’t give anyone a form letter to use, so hopefully the 6,149 will mostly be people we asked to go there and write their own comment about why cub handling should be banned. We filed this petition with USDA, along with our Big Cat Coalition partners back on Oct. 18, 2012, so who knows how long it will take USDA to make a decision now.
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