Just before graduating Comeaux High School, our supporter’s daughter Angela completed this 15 ft. mural of animals! How many hidden plants, critters, etc. can you find in her painting?
Sound Bites
The following are excerpts from letters that I write each day. They are posted here because they may answer some questions you may have about Big Cat Rescue.
I have hard drives FULL of photos and many, many vet photos. We always take photos, but mostly capture video because we find that people just won’t read, so our stories have to be audio visual to get the message across.
We maintain two YouTube accounts, with over 400 videos, to do that:
YouTube.com/BigCatRescue and
YouTube.com/DailyBigCat
The first one has had 61 million views and gets more than a million views per month. It is also recognized by YouTube for distribution in schools as safe, educational content.
The second one is mostly for long form content, that isn’t what YouTubers are looking for, but is good for our Internet television at WildAnimalTelevision.com where we have to fill 24/7 time slots.
With the 3D Issue software we could easily embed or link all of these videos, so I am thinking that the future “books” will be primarily video books.
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Back in the 1990’s I would go to Costa Rica with slide shows on vet care and we were heralded as the first facility to share photos of animals undergoing surgery and showing signs of injury, birth defects, etc. Zoos want to be seen as having perfect animals and no problems because the public is becoming ever more aware of how cruel it is to confine them for our own purposes. We don’t have that issue because we are the ones rescuing the injured and maimed, from zoos and private owners, and we want the public to know what happens to animals in cages.
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Our future plans are to finish the 2.5 ac Vacation Rotation enclosure for the big cats.
We just got zoning approvals and some first drafts on a 50 bed Intern dorm. We currently only have 16 beds in three trailers.
Once we begin building the dorm we will move Interns from the two story, Tiger Tail Lodge so that we can convert it to a teaching hospital for cats. The upper floor will be a glassed in, observation deck to watch surgeries below.
Vet students must have direct supervision by a Vet to get credit, so if the Intern dorm charges $3,000 per vet student, for their 3 months onsite, we could pay a Vet to teach here, but our cats don’t need a lot of vet work, so the clinic would be a low cost or no cost, spay / neuter clinic for domestic and feral cats.
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We are a 501c3 non profit and LOVE, LOVE, LOVE 3D Issue!
Do you have a discounted rate for charities?
I would probably need the Enterprize version because I have two VAs who work remotely, my graphics person who works from home and the sanctuary and I work from home and the sanctuary. That’s like 6 installs, but only 3 of us actually using the product.
We have about 90,000 people on our mail list and they currently get a monthly e-zine and a quarterly print magazine, but we post the print version at Issuu.com
Your product would bring our magazine to life and enable us to benefit from hosting on our own site, rather than sending our traffic to Issuu, but 2,600 is a LOT of money when we have more than 100 lions, tigers, bobcats, etc. to feed every day.
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Cat Chat is a LIVE, interactive show on WildAnimalTelevision.com that airs every Wednesday at noon (EST). You can call in to interact live with the producer, David Stanton and Big Cat Rescue CEO Carole Baskin. It is a fun and informal hour of chatting about cats of all kinds. WildAnimalTelevision.com broadcasts 24/7 and can be seen on JustinTV and soon on Roku.
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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:
Today at Big Cat Rescue May 28 2013
