BCR REPRESENTED AT UNITED NATIONS WORLD WILDLIFE DAY EVENT

Subsequent to Carole being asked to speak last year at the Jackson Hole Film festival where big cats were the species of discussion, Carole became one of the judges for the Big Cat Film Festival to be held in New York City on March 2-3 for World Wildlife Day. The trip included special seating at the invitation only morning event held at the United Nations in a room just down that hall from the Security Council room.  The UN event, moderated by the CITES Secretary General John Scanlon, brought together an interesting mix of conservationists, NGOs, representatives from numerous governments around the world including a representative from the US State Department, and big cat documentary film makers.

 

The photo shows Howard and Carole up on the big screen, but only because we happened to be sitting behind a filmmaker who was one of the speakers.

 

The discussion was a mix of distressing detailed statistics on habitat loss and shrinking populations interspersed with many encouraging examples of efforts that really are working. Many of the latter are focused on reducing human vs. big cat conflict caused by predator attacks on livestock. One particularly successful very creative effort has been the established of the Maasai Olympics as a way for Maasai Warriors to compete and enter manhood instead of the traditional killing of lions. Another example was improved management of large parks where reintroduction of big cat species that had disappeared has turned them into successful ecotourism enterprises. The one theme running through so many of the positive examples was the necessity to enlist buy in and cooperation from the local residents in the solutions.

 

At the end of the session we had the opportunity to speak privately briefly with the US representative. We brought up how the Chinese were pointing to the rampant breeding and lack of tracking of tigers in this country as a way to damage the credibility of the State Department in its efforts to urge other countries to stop the sale of tiger parts and products made from tiger parts. We explained that our small organization attended for the first time the most recent CITES meeting in South Africa and was one of the organizations sponsoring the tiger side event. At that side event, which was specifically directed at tiger farming, a Chinese representative toward the end stood up and shouted “at least we know where our tigers are.” The representative was very frank that while he was asked to come make the prepared remarks for the meeting, this was not his expertise, but promised he would introduce us to the people in the State Department who dealt with this issue more directly.  True to his word, before the day was out we received an email from him with those contacts. A few days later we had a fascinating hour long conference call with his colleagues and agreed to follow up that we are very excited about.

 

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.  These are my views and opinions. 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 will recognize themselves in my words and have the strength to do what is right for themselves and our shared planet.  

 

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Music (if any) from Epidemic Sound (htt