2009 Annual Report

 

Big Cat Rescue is more than just a place that provides permanent care for big cats.  It is a movement;  a change in the tide of human perceptions and is the combined effort of more than 60,000 supporters.  If you are one of them, you are a Big Cat Rescuer and the following is the great work YOU did!  If you haven’t helped yet, you can do so now at the top right of the screen or here:  http://bigcatrescue.org/donate

 

Big Cat Rescue’s Mission Statement:  Big Cat Rescue’s dual mission is to provide the best home we can for the cats in our care and educate the public about the plight of these majestic animals, both in captivity and in the wild, to end abuse and avoid extinction.  We are Caring for Cats and Ending the Trade

 

Advances:  With your help we are winning in the battle for compassion!  Up until 2003 the number of requests for rescues we had to turn down due to lack of space or funds had roughly doubled every other year, to 312 that year. We feared it would double again to over 500 in 2004. Instead, it has steadily declined since then thanks to the passage of a federal bill and several state bills that restrict the ownership of exotic cats. This year we “only” had to turn away 50 big cats who were unwanted by their owners.  We offered to take all of the cats who were cougar size or smaller, if their owners would contract to never own another exotic cat, but they all refused.  We just do not have enough Senior Keeper staff to take on more lions or tigers.

 

By now everyone knows that communication and fundraising will be cell phone centric.  On April 30, 2009 we added mobile phone number collection to our contact forms and promoted this new request with the Animal Lover’s Dream Vacation Giveaway.

 

We upgraded all phones and Internet service at the sanctuary to FIOS which Increased upload / download speeds by 10 times enabling us to be much more efficient. This was necessary to handle the fact that so many more of our programs are hosted in the cloud, such as Raiser’s Edge, which we invested in, for donor management and online donations.   Another area in which we improved our efficiency was in opening accounts with SendOutCards.com and Enthusem.  Both sites are similar in that they provide a fast and easy way to send real cards from anywhere that you have an Internet connection, but we chose both because they have different aspects that work well for us.  SendOutCards.com has an easy to use interface and Enthusem gives us both a way to track who has responded to special codes that we print into the card and also provides us with an excellent card shop that our supporters can use without having to commit to a contract.

 

Animal Care:  By the end of this year, 74 of our 120 cats are over the age of 15. This is well beyond how long they are designed to live in the wild and much older than most zoo cats.  This is a testament to the excellent animal care we provide, but we are dealing with many more age related illnesses and are losing more of our big cat friends every year. Even though we offered to rescue the 17 lesser cats who were in need of rescue in 2009, Sophia the cougar and Desiree the serval were the only ones to come here.  We renovated a mobile spay trailer that we had provided to local area feral cat groups, who now have their own clinic, into a mobile rescue trailer.  Vern stayed busy this year with all of the maintenance issues and with these cage improvements:

 

Added a room addition onto both of the rehab cages so that these cats can be shifted to a safe side with plenty of places to hide while their cages are cleaned.  Repaired Serengeti Serval’s cage, and most of the other servals cages that had rusted from the constant spraying. Katmandu & Kanawha Siberian Lynx’s cage  was repaired as was their den, repair of ponds in cougar cage and in most of the tiger cages, Anasazi and Will Bobcat’s den repair, replaced rusted wire on Natasha & Willow Siberian Lynx’s cage, repaired the