Tigers For Tigers Coalition Update

Tigers at Big Cat Rescue

The National T4T Coalition has been very productive since the conference in April. So far we have developed and sent letters to our congressmen asking for their support for H.R.1998. We also developed an informational sheet on the influence of crime syndicates on wildlife trade.

Last week, members of the coalition were in Washington DC with David Houghton of the National Wildlife Refuge Association and Tracy Coppola of the International Fund for Animal Welfare to meet with congress to discuss a variety of initiatives. We worked with the National Wildlife Refuge Association to ask congress to support the Multinational Species Conservation Fund of the USFWS's Wildlife Without Borders program by transferring $50 million from USAID to FWS to combat wildlife trafficking and trade throughout the world. We met with members of the senate appropriations committee and others. It was a great success and everything was well received.

We also asked for their support to re-authorize the Save Vanishing Species stamp of the U.S. postal service to supplement conservation efforts. We worked with Tracy to ask support for the Big Cats and Public Safety Protection Act and met with senators of Louisiana, South Carolina, Missouri and Maryland. From my impressions, the staffers were willing to consider the bill and were going to report all of our concerns and asks to their boss. Pete Stone, our film director, attended the trip to DC as well and is currently producing a documentary of our efforts.

We are currently working on a social media campaign for the summer months. The goals of the social media campaign is to provide information on tiger conservation and their issues, take action by providing our facebook friends with links to make a difference, and increase our recruitment for the upcoming academic year. We will be working with USFWS to promote the Save Vanishing Species Stamp, NWRA in support of the Multinational Species Conservation Fund and IFAW and Big Cat Rescue on the Big Cats bill.

We just received a new school on board the national coalition, the University of West Alabama. We look forward to collaborating with them soon. The coalition is now working to collaborate on local initiatives that they can implement at their own schools in their own capacity.

Please Like and Follow us at the following links to stay up to date on our progress.

https://www.facebook.com/t4tcoalition

https://twitter.com/T4T_Coalition

Thank you, Sean Carnell #NT4TC

Today at Big Cat Rescue June 17 2013