Program areas at BCR
Care for Big cats - provided a permanent home for approximately 39 Big cats, many of whom have been abused, abandoned, orphaned or retired from performing acts. Care included food, shelter, veterinary care through a state of the art Cat hospital, operant conditioning and consistent frequent enrichment activities. Successfully rehabilitiated 4 orphaned or injured Florida bobcats and released them back into the wild.
In-situ grants - we provide grants to nonprofit organizations and individuals to support in-situ conservation work directly related to preserving Big cats in the wild. Grants ranging from 1,000 to 20,000 were made to 17 in-situ conservation projects spanning 17 species in 9 countries.
Advocacy - historcally the sanctuary performed its advocacy mission by teaching about the plight of the Big cats in captivity and in the wild through guided tours of the sanctuary to approximately 30,000 visitors during the year. Due to covid the sanctuary was closed to visitors other than a limited number of small tours for donors and that has not changed. The sanctuary has continued to educate about these issues and advocate for legislation through its website that received approximately 2.8 million visitors during the year and through emails no less than monthly that go to over 82,000 recipients. Our youtube channel bigcattv.com has over 1.3 million subscribers and our videos there have received over 649 million cumulative views. We had over 4.2 million facebook followers at year end, over 309,000 followers on twitter, and over 176,000 on instagram. On tiktok we had 421,600 followers and 3.2 million likes. We continued to successfully urge owners or operators of venues not to allow Big Cat exhibits on site and to urge advertisers not to use Big cats in their television, online and print ads. We worked actively with us fish and wildlife service on enforcemetn of the Big Cat public safety act.