My mother told Howie that Dad’s heart is only working at 20%

That seems to be right, judging by his condition, but what is weird is that this is the first time she’s said that and she said it to Howie and not to her kids.  During the past couple weeks, she did tell me once that one of the doctors, who she said had a terrible bed side manner and told her that Dad was dying, so what did she expect him to do.  She got all teary, so I had not pressed her, and at the time thought, “Well, we’ve known he was dying since 2011, when the valve repair attempt, wasn’t completely successful.”

 

When I called to check on her and Dad yesterday, before leaving the sanctuary, she said he was trying to eat more, even though everything tastes so bad to him and that he was sleeping.  She said she was going to let Mrs Hammondtree take over teaching her children’s class at church because Dad didn’t want her to leave his side.  I guess he knows the end is near.

 

I took NyQuil to go to sleep last night.  I haven’t been sleeping well and feel dazed.  Howie was sniffling after returning from his four day trip to CO and I don’t want to contract that and risk bringing it to my parents.  Of course, I woke up thinking about the strange relationship I’ve had with Dad for as far back as I can remember.

 

I appreciate that my parents stayed together these 56 years, as marked on July 1 of this year.  I love that they have managed to provide such a supportive role for my brother and me and our children and his grand children.  I am grateful for the work ethic that both of them instilled in me.

 

I started crying again writing this and my vision has been a mess the last week or so with all of the crying in my contact lenses.  So, I went into Facebook to smash trolls and respond to our supporters.

 

There I found a message from Courtney, my contact from explore.org who had reached out to Facebook for us to report that their company, Instagram, had unfairly shut down our account of 52,000 followers based on false claims by Black Jaguar White Tiger’s Eddie Serio that we are buying likes, which is a violation of their terms of service.  Today our account was restored.

 

It reminded me of this quote:  "If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance." - George Bernard Shaw

 

What is the one thing that makes people nervous about associating with us?  It’s the fact that all of the circus folk, back yard breeders, roadside zoos and pseudo sanctuaries will come out en masse posting lies and half truths about us.  We’ve always been open and honest about our evolution and our mistakes and we quickly learned from them and changed.  The bad guys want everyone to know that the things we did 20 years ago (’94-’97 mostly) were the same as what they are doing today.

 

Anyone who thinks about that for half a minute will see that it’s crazy to say, “Big Cat Rescue is bad because 20 years ago they bought, bred and touched exotic cats, just like we are still doing.” Sadly, people are lazy and it’s easier to just forward something that looks bad to all their contacts, rather than really think about it.

 

The first thing they should be considering is; why do the bad guys hate Big Cat Rescue so much?

 

We wear it as a badge of honor that exotic cat abusers hate us more than any other sanctuary. That tells you we are doing the most to end the abuse.

 

Hi, I’m Carole Baskin and I’ve been writing my story since I was able to write, but when the media goes to share it, they only choose the parts that fit their idea of what will generate views.  If I'm going to share my story, it should be the whole story.  The titles are the dates things happened. If you have any interest in who I really am please start at the beginning of this playlist: http://savethecats.org/

 

I know there will be people who take things out of context and try to use them to validate their own misconception, but you have access to the whole story.  My hope is that others wil