FLORIDA WILDLIFE COMMISSION ADAPTS TO CHANGING TECHNOLOGY RE IMAGES OF REHAB BOBCATS ON THE INTERNET

Changes in technology like the now pervasive use of social networking on the Internet are drastically changing how people communicate and how they expect to receive information.  One challenge for regulators is how to adapt their rules to these dramatic changes.

An important and incredibly satisfying portion of what we do is taking in orphaned and/or injured bobcats and bringing them back to health, teaching them to hunt, and returning them to the wild.  A rule about not exhibiting rehab animals that was established way before the internet existed prohibited publishing photos or videos of the rehab animals.  The unintended consequence was that, as people increasingly rely on visual presentation as the way they want to receive information (versus reading the written word), not being able to show our rehab work visually was increasingly limiting the ability of ourselves and other rehabbers to educate the public about the importance of rehab work in preserving Florida’s wildlife and the need for us to live in harmony with our wild neighbors, particularly as we continue to impact their habitat and have more contact with them.

Late last year we began an active dialog with staff and counsel at the Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) about the impact this was having with the generous pro bono help of two passionately cat loving attorneys, David Ganje and Eric Husby.  The dialog with FWC staff and counsel was a mixture of brainstorming together on both the legal and practical aspects of the issue, including how to balance the concerns on which the rule was originally based against the benefits of creating more public interest and knowledge about rehab work that is now made possible by the widespread use of images and video on social networking platforms.

Particularly in the last few months FWC moved on this issue with speed that is difficult to accomplish in the administrative world of a government agency and came up with a solution that we feel addresses both the concerns and the needs in a fabulous way.  They established a separate permit that rehabbers can get that grants permission to display images and video of rehab animals.  To protect the animals, the permit is conditional on taking and publishing images and video in a manner that does not create harm or stress to the animal or in any way impede the rehabilitation of the animal.

Big Cat Rescue is pleased to be the first recipient of this permit and would like to enthusiastically thank FWC for what we feel was a classic example of how a government agency and a stakeholder can work together to address and adapt to issues created by a world where technology changes so rapidly and in ways that rules or procedures established in a prior era could not have predicted.

by Howard Baskin, CFO Big Cat Rescue

Here is the page on our site and videos of bobcat rehab and release: