Big Cat Updates

Devin Saari added a new post to Important Info » Important Updates:  9/19/2017 Tuesday

Today was a very busy day and we had a good amount of volunteers to help with feeding and cleaning!

We worked on Frosty cage today and completed 2 of the 3 bubbles!

Two tours went out today.

Keisha’s enclosure still need to be done so that she can come home from vacation!

The supplies on the slab area including the cages are clean and ready to be put away.

We cleaned the Party House up so that it is clean for the meeting tomorrow.

Zeus is doing great and is loving his food!

That’s all folks~ Devin

Kitten Updates

The Modglin and Himalayan houses have new kittens. Modglin has six 7 week olds, that will possibly be guests at Tux’s & Tails, the Humane Society’s gala fund raising event!

Himalayan has three 4.5 week olds, each came separately, but are doing great together.

Both houses please bring a fecal sample for me to read tomorrow. I will need it to be labeled and placed on the floor of the cooler.

I’m hoping to get them SNAP tested tomorrow so at least the bigger ones can go to the Cabana on Friday. The younger ones may be a bit too little yet. – Karma to the Interns

Cool Milestones

More than 2,000 Calls of the Wild have now been made at BigCatAct.com  Thanks for calling!

Our YouTube channel just surpassed 500,000 subscribers!  Thanks for watching!

Videos

Carole’s Corner

Another crazy day.  I got to ride my bike to work for the first time since Hurricane Irma was threatening us a couple weeks ago.  It felt good.

Got to the sanctuary in time to do a quick check on things and then headed over to the “Goose House” as Howie insists on calling the Meeting House (because he bought a plastic goose to sit in the yard) for our staff meeting.  A bank had rented the Lion’s Lair Party Pavilion, which is where we usually have our meetings and where a lot of us have our offices.  Staff meetings are usually an hour and a half but pretty interesting.  Kathryn gave us an update on the bobcat kitten rescue that she coordinated yesterday.  I had updated you guys, but our staff hadn’t been updated.

Then a call came in from a man in Apopka, FL.  He said he’d caught a bobcat and that he’d already shot five of them over the years for going after his chickens.  Sometimes I think these calls are the Universe testing my patience.  I can’t legally take the bobcat from him, because I can only do that if it is injured, and I have to return a bobcat, after rehab, back to the same spot, if possible.   I have to be careful how I word that though, because I don’t want him to hurt the bobcat so that I will come get him.  I also have to be careful, because those who hate us for ending the trade in exotic cats, are always trying to set us up to break the law.

It led to a very long discussion about how to properly pen up farmed animals at night and ways to prevent becoming a bobcat buffet.  I let him talk, and talk and talk, as these callers always do, and then did my level best to be friendly and understanding while explaining that he “clearly saw that killing bobcats wasn’t fixing his problem.”  I explained how he might see a trend, if he’s observant of the timing, of youngsters who haven’t quite mastered their skills, and that if he can just incorporate more ways to deter the bobcats, he may prevent killing one of nature’s most magnificent creatures.

I went on about how people would pay to see bobcats at close range, like he claims to do all the time, and that maybe he could generate funds for his pens by setting up trail cams and live webcams.  By the end of it all he decided that bobcats were just too amazing to snuff out, like he’d done in the past.  He said he was going to take the cat a long way away and set him loose.  I told him that I couldn’t advise him to break the law like that, but that it would really make me happy if he did give the cat another chance.