‘Tiger King’ Subject Carole Baskin to Close Big Cat Rescue Sanctuary
Tiger King subject Carole Baskin and her husband, Howard Baskin, have a major update for all their “cool cats and kittens” out there: The couple is closing their Big Cat Rescue animal sanctuary in Tampa, Florida.
“Big Cat Rescue has entered into an agreement with Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge, an accredited sanctuary in Arkansas, to move most of Big Cat Rescue’s cats to Turpentine Creek, where we will continue to fund their care for the rest of their lives,” Howard wrote in a March 27 memo on the sanctuary’s website.
Howard explained that as he and Carole spent the last decade “focused intensely” on getting the Big Cat Public Safety Act signed into law, the cat population at Big Cat Rescue aged and dwindled. “As the population declines, it becomes an increasingly inefficient use of donor funds per cat to operate a facility like ours,” he wrote. “The win-win solution both for our captive cats and the cats in the wild is for us to merge our cat population with the population at another existing accredited sanctuary and devote the remaining resources of our sanctuary to the ‘in situ’ projects being conducted around the world to avoid extinction.”
So now the Baskins are in the process of moving their cats to Turpentine Creek, located in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, ahead of a sale of the Big Cat Rescue land. “Once we have no cats at the sanctuary, we will sell the sanctuary property and use the proceeds to fund these species-saving projects in the wild,” Howard added. “Supporting our cats in larger enclosures at Turpentine Creek, at much lower cost per cat than we incur by continuing to operate Big Cat Rescue, will free up resources to let us do much more to save big cats in the wild.”
Turpentine Creek, meanwhile, announced on Facebook that it would be taking in 35 cats from Big Cat Rescue as part of an expansion that “build[s] a sustainable future for animals rescue.”
Carole broke into public consciousness in 2020 with the Netflix series Tiger King, which covered her rivalry with zookeeper Joe Exotic and the murder-for-hire plot against her, for which Joe Exotic is now serving a 21-year prison sentence. Since then, she competed on Dancing With the Stars and appeared on the game shows I Can See Your Voice and The Wheel.
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