When to click away from an animal video
–Any wild animal in a house/being treated like a pet. Yes, even if they say they “rescued” it. No legitimate rehabber would EVER treat a wild animal like a pet. Repeat after me: it does not matter if the animal is not suitable for release; they still shouldn’t be kept as a pet.
–Free contact with big cats. Even if it’s a “sanctuary”.
–People interacting with wildlife. Feeding, petting, playing with, etc.
–Free handling venomous snakes.
–Predator and prey interacting. Cats and birds, dogs and birds, literally anything else with birds. Cats or dogs with rodents, etc.
–Any video that claims a wild animal is domesticated. Wild animals are NOT domesticated, but they can be tamed. These are two very different things and anyone who doesn’t understand the difference shouldn’t be owning one of those animals.
–Any video claiming that (insert wild/exotic species here) is “just like owning a dog/cat!” i.e. the video that went around saying foxes are “the best characteristics of cats and dogs”.
–Facilities that breed hybrids or morphs (i.e. ligers, white tigers, coywolves, etc)
–Obese animals being portrayed as “cute and chonky”.
–Click bait titles about dangerous/exotic animals i.e. “bitten by my king cobra!”, “my pet fox did what?!?”, “letting my pet alligator pick out a toy!”. You get the idea. Anyone using wild animals to get views/publicity does not have their best interests at heart.
–Any “dog trainers” promoting dominance theory (this shit has been disproven so many times and is not even accurate for wolves…)
–Owl cafes, otter cafes, or any kind of wild animal cafe.
Seriously, don’t give these people views. I understand that it can be hard to distinguish good and bad animal videos, but try and be critical of what you’re consuming. Giving these people views gets them sponsorships and money. Plus, more views = increased circulation of the video. This is honestly especially important on TikTok because there are so many younger people on that app. Look at the comment section on any pet wildlife video and it’s “omg I want one!”, “where can I get one?” over and over. And yes, this does matter. It has been proven that the media we consume does influence people to get these as pets. It is currently baby animal season in the US and my clinic is inundated with people who “rescued” baby wildlife (aka nest-napped) and now want to keep them as a pet. Mostly raccoons but also squirrels, opossums, ducklings, wild birds, and pretty much everything you can imagine.
Boosting this job opportunity!
The link to the job application is here, since obviously the one in the screenshot won’t work.
I honestly cannot remember if I ever actually mentioned this in the blog. I’ve been fact-checking for SciShow as a freelance contractor for almost two years, and more recently joined a second show run by the same parent company, Complexly. I really enjoy the work, and have found I’m a big fan of the work culture of SciShow and Complexly as a whole.
So if you’re a science writer - or even an aspiring one! - I’d absolutely recommend checking out this staff writer job opportunity. You’d basically get to write stuff where you can geek out about really interesting science topics in a fun way that makes them accessible to the general public. (Please note this is not an Approved Job Description TM, just my perception of it, obviously check out the actual official one please.)
I’m not posting this on behalf of the company, I don’t represent them, etc. etc. I’ve just enjoyed my involvement with them as a freelancer enough to want to boost this independently because I’m pretty sure it’ll be fantastic. There’s so many fantastic writers tackling science topics on tumblr that y’all needed to know about it.
Hey folk, can you add your favorite beta husbandry care guides to this in the reblogs? I need to snag some resources to help a friend improve their setup and I can’t remember for the life of me who the fishkeeping blogs are who’ve put out the fantastic guides I remember.
Hey folk, this is something new in the zoo world and super cool and so I want to boost it. In the wake of last summer’s BLM protests and the conversations around race and equity they kickstarted, the zoo industry has been taking a nice hard look at diversity and inclusion from a lot of angles. One aspect of that is that members of minority groups in the field have been speaking out about their experiences, showcasing their excellence, and advocating for their own needs.
Now, there’s an entire professional membership group dedicated to supporting and mentoring zoo professionals from minority groups. I wanted to boost it in case anyone in the keeper community on tumblr would benefit from being part of it - and also because I think it’s a fantastic thing to have exist and I want to support it as much as possible.
“The Association of Minority Zoo Professionals (AMZP) exists as a network of professionals currently working in exotic animal care and conservation disciplines focused on increasing minority representation throughout the zoo industry. We strive to build relationships amongst minorities presently in the field and to increase minority representation in all disciplines and at all levels in zoos, aquariums and exotic wildlife facilities. We do this by offering outreach, mentoring and professional development resources to people of diverse ethnic and racial heritages interested in this career path.”
A couple of folk have reblogged the first post I made about Planet Zoo, and now that I’ve put… uh… over 200 hours into the game… I wanted to share with you my thoughts about one particular aspect of the game.
I love that they built conservation breeding into the game, and that they tried to assess how difficult it would be to get animals with good quality genetics for the various populations. But… there’s some real-world availability issues with the system.
Some of the hardest species to get in the beginning of the game are lions and giraffe. I get that for the lions, I guess, because they’re trying to make it so you’re only working with endangered subspecies. Giraffe make less sense, because they’re pretty common in zoos, even subspecies purebreds. In the US, if you’re starting a small zoo, some of the absolute easiest animals to acquire are going to be generic (mutt lineage) lions and reticulated giraffe bulls (because there’s always too many and they have to be housed separately). In Planet Zoo? If you can snag one or two of either species within your first ten years of operation, with half decent genetics, you’re doing super well.
You know what species is easy to access en-mass early game, easy to breed, and easy to care for?
Chinese. Freaking. Pangolins.
…lolwhatno.
@frezgle’s comment made me think I should maybe explain!
“i could count the number of pangolins I’ve seen in zoos I’ve been to on zero hands”
That’s because there’s like 40 in the US at six institutions, and maybe one is on display. There was one at San Diego a few years back that did rare appearances but wasn’t on exhibit, but I believe it passed away a while ago. Last I heard Brookfield had one on exhibit but that was in 2018 (and I’ve been since then, so somehow I either managed to miss a pangolin?! Or that’s changed).
One of the problems pangolin conservation has faced for ages is that they’re hard to care for, harder to feed, and we had no idea the conditions they needed to breed in. This is both an issue for ex-situ and in-situ conservation efforts - what do you do with a whole bunch of confiscated insectivores that need rehabilitation before being released if you don’t happen to have a bunch of giant bug colonies on hand?
The few that have been imported into the US were brought for the purpose of research, not display, in order to help solve those problems. They’re kept off-exhibit because they stress easily and because that way scientists can observe behavior that is influenced by as few external variables as possible. And it’s been pretty successful! Brookfield has bred them successfully, and members of the consortium figured out how to source an insect-based mash diet that fulfills their nutritional needs!
So yeah. You don’t see pangolins because they’re just not zoo animals and they’re incredibly difficult to obtain or import - it happens for research, not exhibition. Whereas Planet Zoo lets me have like, 40+ breeding pairs on public display with minimal effort if it want to!
A couple of folk have reblogged the first post I made about Planet Zoo, and now that I’ve put… uh… over 200 hours into the game… I wanted to share with you my thoughts about one particular aspect of the game.
I love that they built conservation breeding into the game, and that they tried to assess how difficult it would be to get animals with good quality genetics for the various populations. But… there’s some real-world availability issues with the system.
Some of the hardest species to get in the beginning of the game are lions and giraffe. I get that for the lions, I guess, because they’re trying to make it so you’re only working with endangered subspecies. Giraffe make less sense, because they’re pretty common in zoos, even subspecies purebreds. In the US, if you’re starting a small zoo, some of the absolute easiest animals to acquire are going to be generic (mutt lineage) lions and reticulated giraffe bulls (because there’s always too many and they have to be housed separately). In Planet Zoo? If you can snag one or two of either species within your first ten years of operation, with half decent genetics, you’re doing super well.
You know what species is easy to access en-mass early game, easy to breed, and easy to care for?
Chinese. Freaking. Pangolins.
…lolwhatno.
Is there anything we as 'The public' can do for the Big Cat Act? Would a petition help here? Can we send a comment to USWFS? Or are there orgs we can support?
I answered another ask like this earlier, but wanted to address this one specifically because you brought up a couple ways to help that are worth chatting about.
As I said on the other ask, to reiterate briefly, until the 2021 legislative season the most productive option is to probably contact your local facilities with big cats and express your concern. Once the new legislative session starts and the next iteration of the Big Cat Public Safety Act has been introduced, reaching out to your legislators about it will be really useful.
As to your ideas:
- Submitting a comment to USFWS could potentially be really useful, but in a different way. Right now they have zero ability to control or impact the bill - it’s only if it gets passed that the responsibility for dealing with it gets handed to them. However, once that happens, they are required to open a public comment period, and submitting a comment about the specific concerns you’d like them to address as they implement the new law would be valuable. Here’s the thing most people don’t realize about these comment periods: they’re not a show of force. Rulemaking procedure requires these agencies to take into account each unique comment or concern. So it doesn’t matter how many times a group gets people to send in a form letter - if they all say the same exact thing, that counts for one (1) concern. If five people have some thoughts they want to make sure get counted send in individually written comments that say different things, that results in five times the impact on the rulemaking process. There’s no weight given to the professional background of the people submitting comments, or their relationship to the topic at hand - it’s legitimately a public comment period. So yeah, if it gets passed into law and you’re concerned about it being implemented in a way that won’t hurt specific things, submitting a comment would be a fantastic idea. By the time that becomes relevant (if it does at all) I’ll have some new resources published that will help people with the process of submitting that type of comment.
- I have no way to quantify this, but I don’t get the impression online petitions are useful. They’re a nice feel-good thing you can do, and it’s cathartic to see the numbers tick up, but I think they’re pretty much the equivalent of mass-signing a form letter. I’ve heard second-hand that form letters pretty much get ditched if they don’t contain anything interesting or unique from constituents - they’re really just a show of force - and so it’s probably more effective to put in a little effort doing something unique instead. (At least one of the major petition sites has a history of providing resources. strategy assistance, and a huge platform to anti-captivity advocacy groups, so also I worry it would get nerfed or something).
It feels tactless to put a plug for my own funding here, but I’m going to do it, because it’s specifically because of my Patreon supporters that I was able to invest the time in doing this level of analysis. In addition, their contributions funded over 30 hours of a professional editor’s time, which was instrumental in making the final product as concise and clear and effective as it turned out to be. Now that this project is done, their pledges are facilitating the creation of the advocacy resources I mentioned earlier, as well as in the previous answered ask. I literally couldn’t have done any of this without them.
So yes, there’s lots you can do! For now, ask the local places / places you support that have big cats to give it a closer look (and maybe send them the full analysis that’s linked in the big post from yesterday). Later, once it’s useful to engage with the legislature again, it’s worth reaching out to your representatives. I’ll do whatever I can to facilitate people doing that successfully once the time comes.
do you think your analysis will have an impact on the legislation? is there anything we can do to help make sure that it gets rewritten?
I don’t know, but I’d like to hope it’ll do something!
It’s pretty clear the Big Cat Public Safety Act is going to pass next legislative season (assuming, like, actual civil war doesn’t break or something). I’m pretty sure Tiger King would have actually pushed it into passing this spring in a normal world, but the pandemic changed legislative priorities. Prior to RBG’s passing I was wondering if they might try to slip it through for a quick vote - which probably would have worked in the House but not the Senate. There’s a lot of bipartisan support for it, so the question is really more about when the legislature is able to deal with floofy, nonessential things like exotic pets again.
At which point, the question of what you or I do with it comes down to timing. I’m still figuring out how to pivot, because my plans for outreach didn’t factor in the legislature being consumed by a heated fight over a Supreme Court seat.
I think the best thing we can do right now is to keep talking about it to reach out to your local zoo / sanctuary / nature center with a cougar and ask them about it. Tell them you’re concerned as a constituent about how it might impact them, let them know the analysis exists, perhaps send them a copy of it. Lawmakers may not have the bandwidth to care about the bill until sometime in 2021, but the groundwork can be laid with the stakeholders who have big cats. It’s going to be an uphill battle to get anyone to pay attention because everyone is so confident that their buddies will just fix any problems that might arise from it for them, but five months is enough time to rattle some cages and see what happens.
My guess is that we’ll see the Big Cat Public Safety Act reintroduced fairly early in the 2021 legislative season. If the country is in total turmoil it might go later, but I get the sense that this legislation is a big deal with the constituents of the sponsors, and it may look good for them to just get it out early no matter what else is on fire. I have no idea if it will contain the same text at that point - I’ll do a fast assessment as soon as it drops to try to figure out any changes. Once it’s resubmitted for the new legislative season is when people contacting their representatives will be the most useful, as well as following up with local facilitates that hold big cats. Once we get to that point, I’ll have a bunch of resources created (as part of another big project my Patreon supporters are funding) to assist people in doing that sort of direct advocacy work.
One of the things contained in the Netflix series Tiger King is a heavy pitch for a bill called the Big Cat Public Safety Act , which aims to promote the welfare of captive big cats by creating a federal law that would prohibit private ownership of big cat species and public contact with their cubs. (For the purposes of the bill, “big cats” are tigers, lions, cougars, all leopard species, jaguars, cheetahs, and any inter-species hybrids.)This might sound familiar to you from the blog, too: I did an breakdown of the previous version of the bill in 2018. This post is a summarizes my analysis of the current version of the bill (H.R.1380) - and oh boy do we need to talk about the problems with it.
When I analyze a piece of legislation, I have a methodology that lets me break it down in a neutral manner - that way I can form a fact-based opinion, rather that being influenced by my preconceived notions. To do that, I always look for two things. One, does a bill actually do what legislators and the public think it will? Two, would it do those things well / efficiently / effectively? When a piece of legislation also has the possibility to impact animal welfare or animal-related topics, I also check for a third thing: could it have any accidental or unexpected negative impacts?
The Big Cat Public Safety Act fails all three of those criteria spectacularly.
#1: Does it do what people think it will do? Nope.
- The Big Cat Public Safety Act does not actually remove big cats from private / pet ownership situations. It would make it illegal for pet big cats to be acquired by anyone in the future, but all those big cats currently in private homes stay right where they are… for the rest of their lives. To clarify, these are the the big cats who we are told repeatedly are in horrible welfare situations and being abused - the bill doesn’t do anything to help them. In addition, the penalties aren’t what you’d expect. Break the rules and get a big cat, or breed the ones you’ve been allowed to keep? Cool, that’s either a big fine or jail time, or both - but you know what is left out of the bill text? A penalty that involves confiscating the big cats from pet owners who break the law.
- The Big Cat Public Safety Act does not actually make it illegal for non-professionals to touch / hold / handle big cat cubs. It leaves a nice little loop-hole in there, actually, which means zoos accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) can still let their rich donors and local politicians and visiting celebrities hold a cub as long as they can spin it that it wasn’t “commercial.” How do I know this is an AZA-specific exemption? Because the specific language that sets up that loophole a) makes it contingent on having a type of conservation breeding plan with very specific criteria the rest of the industry can’t fulfill and b) contains very specific phrasing that only shows up in letters the AZA CEO has written opposing more strict dangerous animal bans at the state level. So, basically “bad zoos” have to stop doing evil commercial things and letting people handle cubs because it’s harmful to them, but if an AZA zoo conveniently finds an opportunity to hand a clouded leopard cub to a visiting celebrity to snuggle, it’s fine because it fits within the exemption they apparently wrote for themselves.
- The Big Cat Public Safety Act does not require consistent safety protocols to be used when housing big cats. Licensed exhibitors (so, zoos and sanctuaries that you can go visit) have to have some pretty strict ones, but sanctuaries that aren’t open to the public or even pet owners? Nada. Even though this bill has been messaged for years using stories of graphic injury and children killed by a neighbor’s pet tiger, all those private owners who get to keep their current cats don’t have to follow any new safety rules. Nope.
Oh, and there’s another loophole in this thing: the only two big cat species the bill would allow to be within 15 feet of the public without a fence are cheetahs and clouded leopards. These are, of course, the two species that AZA zoos are the most heavily invested in using as ambassador animals - and we’ve got public record of AZA’s CEO asking for exemptions for those two species from state dangerous animal bills for exactly that reason. Now, there is an argument to be made that cheetahs and clouded leopards are the “least dangerous” of the big cats (they can fuck you up, but an attack is less likely to be fatal) and therefore the rules for them could be different, but there’s no different set of safety requirements included in the bill for those species - they’re just omitted without further mention. This bill is the Big Cat Public Safety Act, and it has been promoted for years on the backs of literal dead children, but this type of internal inconsistency apparently isn’t a problem for legislators concerned about public safety when it protects the interests of the most politically savvy zoo association in the country.
- The Big Cat Public Safety Act does not require all entities housing big cats to be subject to any type of animal welfare oversight. The only entities with big cats that this bill requires have any sort of welfare oversight are licensed exhibitors: non-exhibiting sanctuaries, state colleges and universities, and private owners won’t have anyone coming and making sure they’re taking care of their animals appropriately. The state college / university / agency thing is a doozy, too - they’re just flat out exempt from all the prohibitions of the bill with no requirements. This is probably included to appease representatives from places here high-profile state-run universities have famously popular live big cat mascots, but in allowing that it also creates a massive loophole that does not ensure animal welfare or public safety. They can literally do anything they want with big cats - buy, sell, breed, whatever - with no safety requirements and no federal oversight.
#2: Does it do whatever it is trying to do well / efficiently / effectively? Nope.
#3 : Does it avoid extraneous negative impacts? NOPE.
I’m combining these two sections for you, because with regards to this bill, these issues are thoroughly intertwined. The reason it took so long to produce this legislative analysis is because there are so many possible problems with the implementation of the Big Cat Public Safety Act that identifying them all and putting them down on paper in a logical, easy-to-follow manner was incredibly difficult. I’m not going to try to summarize them here, because it took me almost 35 pages to cover them in the paper linked at the top of this post. Here’s the gist of what you need to know, though:
If a bill uses a word that is important to the meaning of the bill (e.g. who it impacts or how the new law would take effect) it should be defined within the text, or reference an existing definition somewhere else. If there’s no definition for a term, the regulatory agency that actually implements the law has to make their own. If there’s a bunch of possible different definitions of a term that a regulatory agency could pick, and each one changed the impact of the bill a little bit, it’s possible that the law will end up doing something that legislators and the public didn’t mean for it to do. This is less of a problem when it’s one or two words: H.R. 1380 has ten key terms without definitions. To make it better, there aren’t even definitions for those terms anywhere in relevant law or regulations. So basically the implementing agency is going to have a ton of leeway to decide what the actual scope of the bill is and what entities it impacts.
If you can’t determine how the words in a bill are going to be defined, there’s no way to know the actual impact of the legislation. This a problem with any proposed legislation, but it’s a much bigger deal when you’re dealing with something that has the potential to impact both welfare of live animals and conservation breeding programs for critically endangered species.
So, basically, it is completely impossible to know for sure what the impacts of The Big Cat Public Safety Act on facilities holding big cats will be. At best, the language it could be interpreted in a way that doesn’t change a lot of things. At worst… a bad interpretation of the language “fencing sufficient to prevent public contact” could require pretty much every zoo in the country (including big AZA zoos) to remodel all of their big cat exhibits. Another worst-case scenario is that exhibiting sanctuaries would have to follow the rules zoos do, and it would be financially ruinous to most of them if the definition of the “public” is be determined to include volunteers and interns, due to their dependence on skilled volunteer labor.
There’s also no way to know what happens if a sanctuary or zoo violates the criteria they have to fulfill in order to be exempt from the bill. (Accidental violations are completely plausible: a lion who has had a vasectomy managing to father cubs at a sanctuary, or a guest climbing a fence to pet a big cat at a zoo, would both be considered violations of their respective exemption criteria.) The bill literally doesn’t address what happens in that case, but it makes sense to assume that at some point a facility would no longer be allowed to remain exempt and might have to rehome all their big cats. This would be a huge problem.
AZA zoos barely have enough places to house the big cat SSP populations in - even losing a couple last year due to some new partnership rules was a big deal. Sanctuaries have more actual space, but need funding to build new exhibits and then sustain lifetime care; in a post-pandemic world, the donation-based operations of these may not be sustainable. If one or two zoos or sanctuaries lost their exemptions and had to rehome their cats, it would already stress the system. If multiple facilities went down because of the interpretation of this new law? We’d be looking at a massive crisis that would probably catalyze the disintegration of big cat conservation breeding programs in the US.
So why isn’t anybody worried about this bill? Why are so many legislators supporting it? Hell, why is the zoo industry and the sanctuary industry supporting it?
The short answer to why nobody is screaming from the rooftops about the possible problems with the Big Cat Public Safety Act is, apparently, that everybody trusts it will be implemented in a common-sense way that won’t hurt the “good guys” by the regulatory agency tasked with promulgating it. And that, my friends, is a really bad reason to let a badly written bill pass into law. Especially in this case.
Here’s the real kicker: the regulatory agency that would get to oversee and enforce this bill is the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). That is not who normally deals with anything involving overseeing business that use live animals. Fish and Wildlife deals with fun things like enforcing the Endangered Species Act and regulating interstate commerce that involves big cats, but they have zero history doing the types of things they’d have to do in this bill. Creating regulations for captive animal care is normally under the purview of the United States Department of Agriculture. But since the Big Cat Public Safety Act would amend a law that Fish and Wildlife oversees, that ball ends up in their court.
USDA has a really good understanding of how changes to regulations impact the operations and functions of the businesses they oversee; while they don’t necessarily care about the priorities of their licensees, they at least create new rules and procedures from an informed viewpoint. As a result, the majority of animal exhibitors tend to trust that new regulations coming from USDA are going to be fairly reasonable; accrediting groups like AZA more confident, as they’re used having some political clout that ensures things shake out in their favor.
But the problem with that is that this bill will be implemented by US Fish and Wildlife, who not only are not familiar with how animal businesses operate, but often have a different perspective and alternate priorities regarding the management of captive wildlife. They’ve butted heads with the zoo industry before over their interpretation of the regulations on tigers, and it’s entirely likely they’d do so again when choosing how to implement the law.
What USFWS will do with the undefined terms in the bill, who they’ll decide it will impact and how much - it’s all a huge unknown! That’s what should be a problem for the sanctuaries and zoos currently housing big cats. It’s ridiculous that they’re choosing to support a law that has even the slightest possibility of impacting their programs and their animals so badly.
As far as I can tell, sanctuaries and groups that advocate for sanctuaries aren’t worried about the impacts of the Big Cat Public Safety Act because their people have been heavily involved in writing different iterations of the bill over the years and they assume that since it’s written by people who support them, there’s no risk it’ll be implemented in a way that might harm them. AZA supports the bill because the current CEO ran USFWS service under Obama and he’s telling member facilities it’ll be fine. I don’t know if that means he thinks he knows how the language will be implemented, or if he’s hoping to use political connections to influence the process. Either way, for both industry groups, it seems to boil down to the fact that they trust allies in the legislative process to make sure implementation of the bill would out in their favor - but nepotism is honestly just a bad reason to support a badly written bill.
Even if the current people at USFWS could be expected to interpret everything in the best possible way, the staffing of government agencies can change on a dime. It’s a good practice to assume that all laws will eventually be implemented or enforced by someone who has a less favorable opinion that the person currently in that role. Legislators (and their staffers, who are generally the people actually writing these bills) can’t be expected to grok all the jargon and complicated precedents that comprise how animal industries are regulated; the industry stakeholders and the advocacy groups in promoting the bill, however, absolutely should be on top making sure legislation is written well - and with regard to the Big Cat Public Safety Act, for whatever reason, exactly none of them have done their due diligence in that regard.
Laws that have the potential to impact captive animal welfare and the conservation of critically endangered species must be crafted carefully, thoughtfully, and precisely. H.R. 1380 as written neither meets that duty of care nor fulfills the commitments its supporters have made. The conclusion I came to after spending two years working on this analysis of The Big Cat Public Safety Act is that it must be rewritten before being passed into law in order to ensure it truly protects the welfare of captive big cats in the United States.
That post about the legislative breakdown took way longer to write than I expected (which appears to just be inevitable for every piece of this project). Simplifying complex information is always harder than it feels like it should be.
Since I want to make sure I’ve got time to respond to questions and discuss stuff with people, the legislation breakdown post is now queued for 8AM PST / 11AM EST tomorrow morning.
Thanks for your patience. 😊
So, you know how six months ago, when we still actually cared about Tiger King and it wasn’t just the beginning overture to this hellscape that is 2020, I announced I’d come back to the blog for it and then… didn’t?
That’s was because I had made a rule for myself that I didn’t get to come back and have fun on the blog until I got my analysis of the federal big cat legislation talked about in the show done. No tumblr until the writeup is complete, period. And then it took another six months to finish.
I’m going to to posting about that bill and what it’s a huge problem for anyone who cares about the welfare of captive tigers later today, because we desperately need to get people talking about it before it’s re-introduced in the 2021 legislative session.
And from there… well, we’ll talk about whatever y’all want to. Maybe even Tiger King, if everyone isn’t sick of it at this point.
I promise, y’all, I’m coming back to talk about Tiger King and big cat drama and tiger numbers and the Big Cat Public Safety Act soon! Just gotta get some work finished first.
No. They can never be by definition good because they are non-zoo bodies housing wildlife run by non-animal experts.
At least to the US, this isn’t quite accurate (I can’t speak to AU, whereas zooologicallyobsessed can).
In the US, the sanctuaries tend to be split along a specific line: those that play politics and those that don’t. There are absolutely sanctuaries that provide homes for exotic animals that need them, hire professional carers, and don’t try to get involved in exotic animal politics or friendly with PETA. I know quite a few facilities like this and their staff personally.
The issue is that a lot of the bigger and well known sanctuaries are well known for a reason - they focus a lot on publicity and politics. This does /not/ mean animal care inherently suffers or that their staff are not professional - there are a lot of staff at AZA zoos and who have also worked at exotic animal sanctuaries - but it can mean that the priorities are not always what they should be. The sanctuaries that get big into anti-captivity politics create problems for themselves by messaging that they don’t support any sort of commercial use of their animals (which, technically, should include the public paying for tours but that gets ignored). As a result the majority of their funding comes from donations, which generally come in strongest after a new rescue or a sob story, which means that as populations of animals in need of rescue deplete and their collections age out, they have to find new ways to find new animals - if they don’t, they start losing the revenue they need to support their current collection. And so many end up playing politics and working with animal rights groups to expand the range of places messaged as “bad” so they end up getting sent the animals if the facilities are shut down / go out of business. In addition, donation-based revenues lead to the risk of inconsistent or lowest-cost care (just look at how many are desperate right now already).
Tl;dr some sanctuaries are run by consummate professionals and really do just focus on the animals. They’re the ones you’re much less likely to have heard of, because they’re not investing effort into media presence and politics.
Here’s a weekly calendar of all the regularly scheduled live-streams and new video content being put out by zoos and aquariums! Mostly US facilities right now. (There’s a ton of other facilities putting out lots of content, just not on a set schedule). Also a bonus list of exhibit webcams, if you just want to watch animals do their thing.
Hey folk! The world is hella stressful right now right now, so if you need a break on your social media feed, here’s a new page I created on Facebook that should help!
Bring The Zoo To You will be aggregating all the cute / educational content being posted by zoos during the pandemic. Pretty much: all animals, all the time! (With the occasional facility fundraising plug, because zoo businesses are being hit really hard by forced closures). Please come join us for some feel-good, distractedly fluffy content.
Don’t do Facebook? There’s also a partner Twitter account at @BringTheZoo2You!
