Big Cat Rescue is a Family Affair

 

Pearlie Mae was my blue-cream longhair cat and constant companion from the time I was 8 until after Jamie was born.  When I lived in my truck, she lived with me, and when I didn't have so much as a truck to live in, my parents took care of her.  I'd like to give you a little background on why I am moving my parents and my grandmother, Momma Jacquie, into the Cougar Camp.

 

My parents have always been work-a-holics, so my maternal grandmother helped raised me and thus the name Momma Jacquie.  You have seen her name on Food Prep because when Jamie was old enough for college, she offered to pay her way, but at that time our Food Prep was a truck body with sinks down both sides and cutting up 500 lbs of meat a day was a dangerous proposition with knives flying and people crammed in like sardines.  Jamie asked instead that the college fund be spent on building us a food prep building.

 

In 1997 when I lost my husband I discovered that one of our secretary’s had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of our properties in her name and had become a beneficiary and executor of Don’s will.  We had a dozen or so office staff and handy men to manage our real estate business and I didn't know who I could trust any more, since that woman had been my best girl friend for 17 years so I replaced a dozen people with just my parents.  My mother ran the real estate office and my dad did all of the maintenance to the properties, in addition to all of the cage building here and all of the mowing and maintenance here at the sanctuary.  Even though more than half of their work has always been to benefit the sanctuary, I paid them from my real estate business.  When the sanctuary began to do a little better financially, my father became an employee here.

 

He has worked at the sanctuary 6 days a week for all these years until having triple bypass surgery and repair to five aneurisms in August 2010.  My mother has worked 6 days a week for all these years doing the sanctuary's banking,  and managing all of the mortgages and properties that I donated to the sanctuary as well as investments we have made in recent years as funds have allowed.  She rents out the properties, negotiates the sales, chases down late payments, and cleans up and fixes up the properties when the tenants leave.  She is the one who makes sure that petty cash expenditures have receipts to back them up, she checks our credit card statements to make sure we are not being billed for things we didn't order and works with Howie to do all of the back end work that goes into our tax accounting.  She does all that while still taking care of all of my real estate business and while being the primary caregiver to her 86 year old mother, Momma Jacquie.  She has never been paid a dime from Big Cat Rescue.

 

Any of you who date back to 1998 will remember the day the "old blue van" caught fire and burned on the way to an offsite event.  Back then the sanctuary was costing me hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund and I could not afford another van.  My parents bought and donated the van we currently drive.  They have continued to donate money as well their time over the years and you may have seen their sign out by Joseph Lion.

 

Momma Jacquie doesn't know us any more for the most part and is now suffering from Bell's Palsy which causes her to fall and not be able to get back up.  My mother had polio as a child and is a tiny little person who at 5'4" is not capable of getting my grandmother back up off the ground when she falls.  With 55 acres to mow, my father sometimes cannot hear when my mother calls him for help and she won't bother Jamie or me to come to her.  My parents live in a two story condo in Carrollwood and the stairs are just treacherous for them given the circumstances.

 

I feel the value offered by my family in the past and the value my parents still provide to the sanctuary is deserving of housing on site.  It enables Jamie and I t