Program areas at BCR
Care for Big cats - provided a permanent home for approximately 41 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 5 orphaned or injured Florida bobcats and released them back into the wild.
In-situ grants - we provide grants to nonprofit organziations and individuals to support in-situ conservation work directly related to preserving Big cats in the wild. Grants ranging from 1,000 to 9,500 were made to 23 in-situ conservation projects spanning 13 species in 19 countries.
Advocacy - normally, 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. The sanctuary continued to educate about these issues and advocate for legislation through its website that received approximately 1 million visitors during the year, through emails no less than monthly that go to over 90,000 recipients and through its print newsletter that goes to over 3,400 recipients. Our youtube channel bigcattv.com has 1.3 million subscribers and our videos there have received over 638 million cumulative views. We had over 3.6 million facebook followers at year end, over 300,000 followers on twitter, and over 175,000 on instagram. We continued to successfully urge owners or operators of venues not to allow cub petting or other Big Cat exhibits on site and to urge advertisers not to use Big cats in their television, online and print ads. Our most significant advocacy accomplishment was the passage of the federal Big Cat public safety act into law on december 20, 2022 after over a decade of our leading the effort to get it passed. The bill ends the abusive cub petting and pahses out private ownership of Big cats by those who are not usda licensed exhibitors. We believe this will end 90% of the abuse of Big cats held in captivity in this country.