“Are you asleep?”

Those are words I only hear from Howie when he’s feeling frisky.  I’ve told him he can wake me up for that any time.  He’s also one who gets annoyed if I talk in bed.  I can go full steam all day and right up to bedtime, and then drop dead asleep, but Howie needs time to not think so he can sleep.  Imagine my surprise when instead of him saying something silly like, “I think we have an emergency here,” he says, “What do you think about telling Brittany that we won’t negotiate until they have a signed deal with both Joe and Jeff?”  Of course I was fine with that.

 

It was the obvious thing to do when, on our conference call, Brittany Peet admitted that they haven’t even spoken to Jeff yet. Today Howie sent this to Brittany and Heather Hintz:

 

Brittany we have had some time to reflect and feel we need to take a different path to the effort to make an agreement, a path that was mentioned in passing in our conversation. We would like you to remove us from the current agreement except to the extent that you make the agreement contingent on a subsequent agreement between Big Cat Rescue Corp. and the Zoo Parties.  You pretty much know all of our thoughts from the call Monday. If you want to include the second option of PETA removing the animals, that is up to you.  But, Carole is not going to agree to a deal where any of the Zoo Parties retain any interest in the zoo land.   If Joe wants to keep his home, he can have it moved to the Lake Property.

 

Please understand we absolutely think the world of you personally and of PETA, tremendously value the relationship, are just thrilled with what you have accomplished in the related matter, and support this effort.  But I also need to ask you to understand this.  I flew out to Oklahoma, spent a full 12 hours negotiating a settlement agreement, made concession after concession while repeatedly having Joe fly off the handle and calming him down, spent THOUSANDS in legal fees not just that day but in the week following drafting that agreement while being misled into believe we had a deal.  In the follow up call, Jeff Lowe, who at the time was not a party and not supposed to be on the call, announced they were reneging on the deal.  When he was told the call had to end if he stayed on, his parting comment was “Howard fuck you and your cunt wife.”

 

This falls squarely in the “fool me once…” proverb.  I have been working literally 10-12 hour days with only a half day off in the last two weeks and am now rolling into our financial audit preparation which in our small organization falls entirely on me with continued long hours for the next month.  While we work as a team, Carole is our CEO and she feels strongly that it does not make sense to add more stress to me and spend what inevitably will be thousands of dollars in legal fees to present a draft to Joe and Jeff only to have them, particularly Jeff, take positions that result in this being a waste of time and money.

 

I think the outcome you seek could be a very good solution and we are supportive.  We will do what we can to help make it an arrangement we can accept.  But there are two compelling reasons for going this route.  One is what I have described above. We are simply not going to risk being jerked around a second time at considerable cost of time and money.  Second, this is far more efficient.  Instead of having to get our input repeatedly and then run it through the process that I totally understand you have to engage in, you can just make your deal without another chef in the kitchen, and once you have sorted out what you can with the zoo parties, we’ll work with you on any negotiations that are necessary from there, both any changes we feel are necessary to that agreement, hopefully none, and us negotiating directly with the Zoo Parties what we do with the lawsuits.  This will make your agreement much simpler and let you much sooner find out if there really is a serious deal.

 

I really don’t even ne