Howie Summarizes Cub Petting for Ad Campaign

CUB PETTING PROJECT

 

BACKGROUND

 

Growing public awareness of captive animal issues. In the last few years we have increasingly seen that public awareness of captive exotic animal issues has been growing at an accelerating rate. It has become widespread enough to impact businesses that exploit animals by reducing attendance to a point where they had to either close down like Ringling or change their ways dramatically like SeaWorld.

 

For more on this accelerating trend see an article I wrote for Encyclopedia Britannica at http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2018/10/how-is-the-struggle-for-womens-suffrage-100-years-ago-like-the-battle-to-stop-abuse-of-big-cats/ .

 

Cub petting drives the breeding. The vast majority of the breeding, particularly of tiger cubs, is to create a steady stream of cubs in order to charge the public to hold and pet them, take photos with them, even swim with them.  The cubs are only useful for a few months so a steady supply is needed.

 

This cub petting trade is a horribly abusive treatment of these animals because:

 

• Cubs are ripped from their mothers at birth to make them more manageable because if they are left with the mothers for even a month they become the equivalent of feral cats and not useful. This separation at birth is a torment to any mammal mother and offspring.

• The cubs are physically punished in order to diminish their natural tendencies to play roughly, which nature builds in as part of their training to be successful tigers in the wild.

• The cubs are deprived of the mother’s milk that has immune qualities that bottle formula cannot duplicate. The cubs’ immune systems are further impaired by sleep deprivation, because the cubs, who normally would sleep the largest part of the day, are kept awake as long as there are customers willing to pay. They are often awakened from sleep in order to be used for petting.

• These tiny cubs with weakened immune systems are then exposed to being handled by hundreds of people who may be carrying disease either themselves or from pets at home. Cubs with raging diarrhea and ringworm have continued to be used by the cub petting operations.

• There is no tracking of how many cubs die in the process. There is no tracking of how many that survive are raised until big enough to slaughter to supply the illegal trade in their parts because there is no tracking of what these few breeders do with the cubs once they are too big to pet. The ones that can be tracked end up with miserable lives with the females being unhealthily bred constantly instead of the natural 2-3 year cycle that occurs in nature because it takes that long for the mother to teach the cubs to hunt and for the cubs to reach sufficient maturity to be on their own.

 

There are about a half dozen significant cub petting breeders in the country. Some are in relatively small markets, at least one in the larger SE Florida market.  However, their customers come from all over the country, particularly if they are in vacation destination areas. The rest of the country’s zoos operate without cub petting.

 

Our goal is not to put any zoo out of business. Our goal would be to create such awareness of the misery caused by cub petting that people would

(a) Not patronize it and

(b) Call out those few zoos who do it to a point where the reduced revenue and negative publicity would cause the zoos to change their ways and join the vast majority of zoos who are successful without doing cub petting.

 

BCR Financial Position. We have had a series of good years that has allowed us to (1) fully fund the “pension liability” that insures we can care for the cats to the end of their lives if another 9-11 or other event caused donations and visitors to stop and (2) we have made most of the major capital improvements needed on the sanctuary property. The puts us in a position where, if we thought we could have a meaningful impact on public awareness o