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Animal Talk Radio
Carole Baskin Big Cat Rescue and Marty Irby Taking on Washington DC - Episode 146
Marty Irby from Animal Wellness Action has been lobbying for many laws supporting welfare. One current law that has a ton of momentum is the Big Cat Public Safety Act. Help with this project is a big name in big cats, Carole Baskin. Carole became a household name over the pandemic with the Netflix series Tiger King. Carole's real story and real work is at her Big Cat Rescue. Marty and Carole fill us in on the progress of this current proposed law and make a call for people to get involved. You can easily contact your representative via Carole's website at the link below. Stay tuned for updates as the law moves forward.
How to get involved:
https://bigcatrescue.org/cat-laws/
Congressional Summary Here:
https://animalwellnessaction.org/
Some images from the DC trip
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/carole-baskin-founder-and-chief-executive-officer-of-big-news-photo/1238881807
https://linktr.ee/animaltalkradio
Animal Talk, it’s America’s Pet Show!
Jamie Flanagan
@DJJamieDetroit
AnimalTalkRadio.com
@AnimalTalkRadio
Thanks for listening and as always... Have an exotic week and kiss your wild thing for me.
Send your pet photos in now and we will add your fur kids to the #PetParade. jamie@animaltalkradio.com
Jamie Flanagan: 0:08
Hey, there's the music. That means it's time for Animal Talk. Some of the best doggone pet people on the planet helping with your pets. I'm Jamie Flanagan. I am Matt Fox Hi, jamie, it is time for the show. It is and me and my half of a voice.
Matt Fox: 0:23
Well, you know what You're drinking water. We just celebrated National Bottled and Bond Day, so you got a little bit of thing going on.
Jamie Flanagan: 0:29
I got my froggy voice going for animal talk.
Matt Fox: 0:31
It's sexy, it is.
Jamie Flanagan: 0:32
It is sexy it is so, matt, you're in the middle of a move right now. Yes, move, and you had to move your cat. Yes, I did and yes, I did.
Matt Fox: 0:41
And that's a big project. You know she was an absolute wonderful passenger in the car, yeah, as she was going to her new home.
Jamie Flanagan: 0:51
And.
Matt Fox: 0:52
I still see her on a daily basis. She is my cat.
Jamie Flanagan: 0:55
So and I'm a cat guy too, yes, you know, and Colleen was a dog person, she likes all critters but we wanted she and I were getting our latest cat because I had Kirby for like 19 years. I love the Kirby, I really did enjoy Kirby and then he was gone and then we had a few years, you know cat-less.
Matt Fox: 1:17
But I'm so happy that, kirby, that you were Kirby's entire life, because you and that cat went absolutely everywhere together. We had a great time. You had a great time. You took him to the radio station, you took him everywhere.
Jamie Flanagan: 1:30
But when we were picking out the next cat, we wanted a big cat, okay. We wanted a big boy, okay.
Matt Fox: 1:38
Your current kitty cat, he's like long. Yes, he is.
Jamie Flanagan: 1:43
He's not a fat cat and there was like a point in Kirby's life he's very slender. He was like Garfield. He was like what?
Carol Baskin: 1:51
are you feeding him? I don't like Mondays.
Jamie Flanagan: 1:53
He got really, really big. I just kind of free fed him. I'm a single guy, I don't know what the hell I'm doing here. Open the bag. We're looking for a big cat. We found a big cat. We love having the big cat, but some people, when they say they want a big cat, they mean a big cat, they want a big cat and you know what you think and you're like that'd be cool.
Matt Fox: 2:18
Yeah, let's get a bigger cat.
Jamie Flanagan: 2:21
I got more money than cents, I can do this, all right. And then you get this exotic pet. Oh, you're talking big, big cats, like an honest to God big tiger.
Matt Fox: 2:34
Because you have more money than sense. Okay, now I get it.
Jamie Flanagan: 2:39
A cheetah or a panther Bigger. There's the rumor of the Michigan panther right and it's like there's all these spottings and people say that there's this panther Somebody's pet and it's loose. And now it's loose in Michigan and there's always these sightings. Every summer you'll get like two or three sightings of the Michigan panther. It is downright dangerous to have that wild of a critter. It's got to be misrepresentation Because if there was really a panther out there there'd be a lot of dead poodles, I think, and more trouble. But the problem is that's the problem. There's people with more money than sense and they go out and they get these critters and then they can't care for them. They don't know how to care for them.
Jamie Flanagan: 3:21
Or they don't know how to get them the medical care that they would need or the municipality that they live in.
Matt Fox: 3:26
They're not abiding by the laws of some municipality.
Jamie Flanagan: 3:28
It's incredibly illegal and it's surprisingly not as illegal as as you as one would imagine, and there's people currently working on on legislations. We've talked to our friends in Washington, washington dc, at the uh we have friends in washington dc. We do just believe it or not. Uh, you know, uh, it's uh the animal wellness action group and marty and uh, marty's been working on some big cat legislation.
Jamie Flanagan: 3:58
They've been doing that. They've been doing a ton of stuff, sure, and and they, they work on all kinds of things with the coyotes and the wolves and the burros and the wild horses and horses and horse racing. They have a lot of things that they're working on and we've talked to Marty a few times. But we wanted to talk to Marty about the big cats and Marty is pulling out the big guns. He kind of is Working in Washington DC right now because he's got Carol freaking baskets baskets with him. I love it.
Jamie Flanagan: 4:26
Uh, carol marty, welcome to animal talk, hi guys thank you guys for having us again so, um, so, matt and I, because I mean we're, we're cat lovers and and I, I just I'm enamored by, you know, the, the beasts, and and and the majesty of it and to see them and I guess that that's probably part of the problem is that people are so enamored and they are so majestic and beautiful that you want to see them and you want to see them up close. They're judgmental sometimes, I can imagine. So what is the legality of owning, currently, an exotic, a big exotic, a big cat, in the United States right now? Is it state by state, or is it legal?
Matt Fox: 5:13
Yeah, you're doing a lot of work. Help us understand what's out there. How can we understand this a little bit more?
Carol Baskin: 5:20
Well, first off, I think people are in love with the idea of owning a big cat because they have a very romantic notion of what that is, and it's nothing like the truth. But as far as the legality of it goes, in the United States, there are four states that have no laws whatsoever about whether or not you can own big cats, and everybody else has some form of ban or partial ban of owning big cats. The problem is all of those other states not two of them have identical provisions, so it's this huge patchwork of issues that have led to the need for this federal bill that Marty's been working on.
Jamie Flanagan: 6:00
Carol, if you outlaw big cats, only outlaws are going to have big cats. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, no, that's not good logic, all right so. Marty, so it's called the big cat and S-1210 in the United States.
Marty: 6:17
Senate and Carol has been here all week in Washington DC lobbying. I think we did 38 meetings in person.
Matt Fox: 6:32
Oh, my goodness.
Marty: 6:33
Staff and members of Congress, and so we are working to pass that legislation. It passed through the House of Representatives once in the last Congress in December of 2020. But we only had three weeks left in the Congress to get it through. The Senate Weren't able to do that too much of a tight window, so we had to start over again. But we have 256 of 430 or so members of Congress in the House as co-sponsors, including 50 some odd Republicans. We have about 47 total in the Senate and that is huge to have 300 co-sponsors on any bill.
Marty: 7:01
So there's no greater priority for us on the federal level this year than the big cat public safety act. And that's her life. With carol, she's been doing this her entire life yeah, a long time.
Matt Fox: 7:11
You know that's a lot of hard work and a lot of hours put into it. What? What led you down this path to want to be an advocate for? This type of a passion. Help me understand that. Where does that come from? It comes from naivete did I open the door for you it's like how hard could it be?
Carol Baskin: 7:33
surely people shouldn't have lions and tigers in their backyards. And that was my reaction when, back in the 90s, we started rescuing bobcats and lynx from fur farms and the people started calling and asking will you take my lion? Will?
Carol Baskin: 7:47
you take my tiger and I thought well, surely we can get a law passed that would ban the private ownership of big cats so that this problem no longer exists. And we worked for years and finally, with the help of a number of animal protection groups, got the Captive Wildlife Safety Act passed and that passed in 2003,. And it made it illegal to sell a big cat across state lines as a pet. So we thought we were done. But the bad guys are pretty creative and they figured out they could sell big cats across state lines as pets by just doing it for cash, and nobody would be the wiser until there's a tiger running loose, and by then they're long gone. So we've been trying to close.
Jamie Flanagan: 8:27
So what will this new, the Big Cat Public Safety Act change? What would the change be?
Marty: 8:38
You want to take that part, carol, go ahead with it. We've said this at least 40 times this week, so I think you have to spill down a little better than I did.
Matt Fox: 8:45
What's? One more platform Go ahead.
Carol Baskin: 8:49
So what the Big Cat Public Safety Act does is it corrects a technical flaw that there was in the language that met in 2003. For US Fish and Wildlife Service to take any action, somebody had to violate a state law and a federal law at the same time, and that was not the intention. The intention was that there would not be any big cats as pets, and so we're correcting that technical flaw. But the two main things and we've tried over the years to bring into this a lot of other provisions that we would really like, like maybe convicted criminals, people who had been caught doing wildlife trafficking, shouldn't own exotic animals anymore and we've had to drop every bit of it, except for the two biggest issues, and one is the supply of all of these cubs that end up in private hands, and then the other is where they can dump those cubs when they can't use them any longer, which is into private hands. So it prohibits cub petting and it phases out private ownership, so people who have them can keep them. They just can't buy or breed more.
Matt Fox: 9:52
Okay, so this past week, what has your experience has been like? Who have you been meeting with? Help us understand some of the conversations that you've been having out there. Yeah.
Marty: 10:03
Well, I'll jump in here and let you guys know. I think we had 38 meetings between Monday night and this afternoon. We had Carol here. All week we had wonderful lady Shelby Bobosky with the Texas Humane Legislation Network. They came up. We were really working. The Texas delegation hard as well had one of the best meetings we had. I'd say people will probably find this surprising, but was with Ted Cruz and we spent about 45 minutes with him and I have to say his staff, as soon as we left, said that was as great as a meeting could possibly ever go with Ted Cruz.
Marty: 10:38
So Carol Baskin has the magic touch with Ted Cruz and we talked a lot about the incidents in the state because there were seven at least seven cats that got out last year and had various incidents. Tigers and such three were really, really dominating the news for a while, but they had seven cases and that's the only state where this happened last year. So a big part of the problem is in the state of Texas and met with a lot of other folks from about 10 or 12 states. We thanked some people who had already co-sponsored the Big Cat Public Safety Act Some we were asking them to co-sponsor, asking them to vote for it when it comes up for a vote, and our afternoon this afternoon ended with a really big bang.
Marty: 11:20
I'd say is you always want to try to meet with the leadership in Congress, whether it's Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy, both sides of the aisle? And we happened to get a request from Senator McConnell's office for Carol and I to come see them around four o'clock this afternoon. So that was a good way to end the week and that wasn't planned and we we think we had a really great meeting with them as well and we're going to move this bill. We're going to get it done. Carol's been working for decades on it and there's more support than has ever been in Congress, in the private sector, in the nonprofit world. It's just, it's a no brainer for most people out there.
Jamie Flanagan: 12:02
That's great.
Matt Fox: 12:03
So there's good momentum in Washington, which is you don't hear that often.
Jamie Flanagan: 12:10
There's there's really there's positive momentum in Washington. If someone cared about this and wanted to be involved, would it? Would it behoove them to contact their representative and say, hey, where are you at on this bill, please support. Does that? Does that help? Is that part of your, your project?
Marty: 12:22
Yes, yes, and Carol, you have some great resources you may want to tell them about, right.
Carol Baskin: 12:26
Yeah, we do so. If people go to Big Cat Act dot com and put in their name and address, it will know who your senators and your members of Congress are, and then it gives you three options and I hope people will take all three. You can send an email that we pre-populate for you. It can send a tweet to your member of Congress that we pre-populate for you and it can actually dial all three of your members. So it'll dial both of your senators and your representative in succession and you just stay on the line and we give you a little script that just says please ask your boss to co-sponsor the public safety act. And the system even knows whether or not your member is a member or is a co-sponsor already, because we have 256 in the House and what? 46, 47 in the Senate, and so if they are already a co-sponsor, it will ask you to thank them.
Jamie Flanagan: 13:19
Wow, that is. That's a nice little tool.
Matt Fox: 13:23
I love technology, I really do.
Jamie Flanagan: 13:25
And the Congress people probably appreciate that when you're the person calling is a little bit informed, right, you know a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, but having that little bit of information it just makes you sound a little bit more intelligent and they take the call a little more seriously.
Matt Fox: 13:39
That's something I talk about. It's like you have enough information to be dangerous if you will. But, at the same token, you want to be knowledgeable about your passion and what you want to support at the same time. So thank you for what you do yeah, so all right.
Jamie Flanagan: 13:54
So just uh talking about, uh, just people's love affair with the animals, um, and then carol on on your site, uh, on the big cat rescue site, uh, some interesting, um yeah, disturbing, yeah, eye opening videos about cub petting and a lot of people that have these. You know roadside zoos or smaller attractions or you know air quote zoos. That's what was a common practice for them and a money raising thing, because it costs a lot of money to care for these critters. So that was a way of raising money, but it seems really dangerous.
Jamie Flanagan: 14:37
Uh, well, from the videos it seems like an extraordinarily dangerous practice. Um, but just america's love affair with these, these big cats? Uh, is there any place to have them? You know in zoos, or you know vegas shows? Um, you, um, you know, in your opinion, what's good, what's bad? Uh, should we stop breeding them and let them phase out as as as creatures of, of captivity here? Uh, what, what's the what's? Where should, where should tigers be? In the United States or in Africa, or where they wherever?
Carol Baskin: 15:10
My belief is that all wild cats belong in the wild, and I'm pretty sure the wild cats share my opinion, because if you open the door, they will show you their preference and they are never going to come back, even if it is a hard life out there to support themselves, they'd rather give that a try than being in your cage.
Carol Baskin: 15:28
So I think that we are going to have to remake the way we deal with wildlife in the wild and that we will need to monetize them in the wild in such a way that enables their survival, and I think the first step toward that is, of course, passing the Big Cat Public Safety Act, because as long as you can go to your local mall or a rodeo or a fairground and pet a baby tiger, you're never going to do the hard work of protecting them in the wild.
Carol Baskin: 15:56
And my vision is to have live streaming web cameras in all of the places where these cats live natively and have a subscription fee, just like you would have for Netflix or Hulu that people subscribe to in order to see these cats in real time living free, and then to use smart contracts and cryptocurrency to put the money the lion's share of that money back into the pockets of the people who live next to these animals. Those are some of your forest communities who are burning down forests in order to eke out a meeker existence, whereas if they could be the ones in charge of making the money off of the beautiful wildlife that they protect, it makes everybody a game warden, and that saves our entire planet.
Matt Fox: 16:43
When it comes to that whole cat rescue. You know the big cat rescue. What is some of the costs that's, you know that that it takes to take care of some of these animals, that that that we're facing on a daily basis.
Carol Baskin: 16:56
At Big Cat Rescue we have 51 cats. We just rescued a lion last night from an illegal owner in Florida, and it costs us between three and a half and $4 million a year to take care of those 50, 51 cats. And so we and we estimate that just a single lion or tiger over the course of its life will be about a million dollar investment in food and pet care and housing and such, and so these cats can live into their late teens and early 20s sure, just like any, that's a, just like any pet, any dog or cat that you have today.
Jamie Flanagan: 17:33
That's a whole lot of Netflix reruns there, Carol.
Carol Baskin: 17:37
I don't think anybody's out of that Really, that's.
Jamie Flanagan: 17:44
So there was like, so the show that showcased just those.
Carol Baskin: 17:50
Just the.
Jamie Flanagan: 17:52
It's bizarre the whole. I just it's it's. It's bizarre the whole, the whole. I just want to call them characters and people watching it. It's just as one character is introduced after another, it just doesn't seem real, as I was, can't be real and it's like it's just. But then you see news reports and things and you see that these people are in jail or going to jail or trying to get out of jail and it's like, oh, I guess it is kind of real, but just just very, very strange. So I, because I can't imagine Did you give them permission to be on that or are you? Did you get reimbursed for being part of the those exotics one and two?
Carol Baskin: 18:34
get reimbursed for being part of the those exotics, one and two? No Um, we've worked with the producers for five years on what they said was going to be the equivalent of blackfish for big cats. Were you guys aware of blackfish? No the orcas and sea world and how they're taken from their family pods. And then after that, nobody wanted to go to sea world. They had to change their behavior, and so for five years we thought we were working on a program that when people saw how abusive this cub petting is, and how it's causing the extinction of the tiger in the wild.
Carol Baskin: 19:03
because none of these cats that are bred in captivity are purebred. They're all inbred and crossbred and so they don't serve any conservation values. So we thought if people saw that, they would never support going to these zoos or having their pictures made with a cup. And instead we got Tiger King, which just hardly said anything about the animal.
Jamie Flanagan: 19:22
Yeah, right, it was just, I'm not a big reality TV fan, neither am I. And it's, you know, like all the bachelors.
Matt Fox: 19:33
I'll watch Next Level Chef. I'll watch, yeah, the home improvement stuff. I'm all about that.
Jamie Flanagan: 19:38
But even those are getting a little too reality TV for me. One couple they're divorced back together and it's like, oh just build houses, get on with it.
Jamie Flanagan: 19:48
But wow, it's amazing. I thought for sure that I'm like all right, well, you know, well, I could see doing it for the money, because it costs so much to raise the cats. So you really got shafted on that all the way around because they painted you just not a great light. Safety, um, it, it, I can imagine. I, just because you wouldn't think people would storm the white house, uh, you know. Or congress, the congress building, and, and you know it's like holy crap, people do some really redonkulous stuff and there's people who are like let's storm carol's place, you know, um, do you fear for your safety? Uh, as a result those shows.
Carol Baskin: 20:33
Not as a result of them. The public just became aware of the fact that these animal abusers want me dead and they don't want me to be able to tell Congress what I know about the horrible things that they do. But I've known about this for the past 25 years that I've been working on this and so I've had. I can't even tell you how many death threats over the years from these animal exploiters. I've been physically attacked. We've had our valve stems cut off of our van when we were transporting a bunch of our interns to disney world for a day off and all of the tires blow out. At one time my daughter was able to keep the van upright despite that. I mean, it's just been one thing after another all these years and we had reported joe exotic for his um. He had apparently several people had contacted me saying that he had tried to pay them to kill me over the years and nobody would do anything to about it until they fumbled upon it themselves in a investigation they were doing about lemurs and found out about it.
Matt Fox: 21:35
Right, my goodness. So that's some of the things behind what you guys are doing in Washington DC with the Big Cat Public Safety Act that you guys are walking through. You know the federal bill. It's going to address two of those things that you said earlier. It's the sources of abuse of big cats by ending owner owning big cats, Right, and then they also was the stopping of exploitive roadside zoos from offering cub petting and those photo ops. So that work that you're doing right now, where does the? What's the next step that you guys are going to be walking through, you and Marty? What's going to be happening over the next couple of years?
Carol Baskin: 22:12
You want to take that, marty, as far as how this process works.
Marty: 22:15
Yeah yeah sure. So you know it is never easy to pass federal legislation.
Matt Fox: 22:19
I can't tell you anyone I know that would ever say it was easy, but 2020, it was 2020 the last time you guys had an audience with them, right?
Marty: 22:28
Well, I've been here pretty regularly. I mean, I live like three blocks from the capital, but Carol's been coming in person. Carol's been coming in person since at least May of last year, so May of 2021. So we missed about a year of in-person meetings and things from March of 2020 to March or May of 2021. But we're in the right place and when you send out a meeting request and you ask for a meeting for Carol Baskin, you get a lot of yes.
Carol Baskin: 22:55
Yeah fair.
Marty: 22:56
You know that's. That's also a huge, huge advantage of having you know Carol so widely known. I mean she's probably to me now the most interesting woman on the planet and should be Time Magazine's woman of the year. But you know it's it's amazing to see this, because you cannot walk 10 feet without someone trying to stop and take a picture of Carol. I didn't mean to digress to that other than to tell you how long it takes to pass this and how many meetings we have to do it, how many trips Carol's made. So it's at least four or five in the past, or two.
Marty: 23:35
On what they call the suspension calendar, where you have two thirds of the House vote for something, they suspend the normal rules and it passes. Then we would take the bill over to the United States Senate and what we want to try to do is go through what they call a hotline process and they send out basically an email to all of the 100 senators, whoever the lead sponsor of the bill is, and says hey, does anybody oppose this? Is someone going to vote? No, you hope they don't put a hold on things. We have been able to do that with a few bills.
Marty: 24:05
It doesn't happen that often, but I think this is one that could go that route pretty easily, especially with what we've done in covering the folks who do like to put, with what we've done in covering the folks who do like to put I won't name names, but who do like to put a hold on bills Typically. I think we've really had some great meetings with those folks. This is something everyone can get behind. And then you know we have until basically the end of December to get it passed through the Senate, before the Congress is over. And then you know, as soon as it passes the Senate, most bills are signed within a day or two by the president, and so the goal is to get it done, because if it doesn't pass and it's, it's going to pass, but if, for some reason, a bill does not pass in that Congress, you start over again, whatever bill you're talking about for 2023, like day one.
Jamie Flanagan: 24:51
I'm just a bill. I'm only a bill I know how it works honestly I thought
Marty: 24:57
most people back to that I didn't take civics, but I love that movie. Yeah, yeah, you know, because it was in 2019 through 2020 session of congress.
Matt Fox: 25:06
You had two-thirds of the votes, but that was on december 3rd of 2020, so between now and december of this, there's a lot of work that's got to be done.
Marty: 25:16
Definitely there is. It's all headed in the right direction, though, and we feel really good about it, and the more that people can do what Carol asked about going to the website calling, and what a marvelous process she has set up there to make it so easy for one and the more of that occurs, the better shot we have and the faster we're going to get this done, so that really does mean a lot, all right I don't mean to take you back to tv, but I want to go back to tv.
Matt Fox: 25:40
I want to talk philanthropic, just.
Jamie Flanagan: 25:41
Uh, just, I'm going to go to tv for a second, all right, and then you can go back to film. But, carol, it surprises me that you got shafted. I can see how you got hoodwinked like that. Um, all right, we've talked to paul watson from the the sea shepherd and, uh, you know the the whale wars they did that and and that you know, because he got a, you know that really helped his projects, uh along.
Jamie Flanagan: 26:02
So I can see why you were trying to do that. Oh, this is going to help our project and you're like, wow, this is a freak show, how do we get into this? But there's, there's a new one coming out. That's a bit more. It's not. It's not live, it's live action, but it's with actors, right. So it's Carol and no, it's Joe and Carol, right?
Carol Baskin: 26:25
Joe versus Carol, joe versus Carol alright, so that's coming out.
Jamie Flanagan: 26:30
What is? Do you have input in that and are you benefiting from that and are you excited about that one?
Carol Baskin: 26:38
Well, I haven't seen it yet. It actually started streaming today on the Peacock. Okay, and it began playing me and Kyle McLaughlin playing my husband. Hey there you go.
Carol Baskin: 26:48
From what I've seen from the trailers and some of the interviews that Kate's been doing, it at least talks about the big cats and they use CGI cats because we had begged that there not be any real cats exploited in something that was about me trying to end big cat exploitation and they never responded to us. I've never spoken to anybody with that production company other than the very first conversation that we had with Wondery, but she had said in some of the articles or the interviews that she's done that she based her character on my diary. So my diary is available on youtube every day of my life. I've been doing it for the last two years, going back to when I was a child, so she got a chance to see who I am and what I'm about and get that kind of background and see how, how I come across, which there was never a sit down.
Matt Fox: 27:36
You know, talk to, you know one another one on one, it was always just so is the big cat rescue going to benefit from that at all?
Carol Baskin: 27:43
no wonder he came to me after they did the podcast back in 2019 before hiker came out. There was a laundry podcast called over my dead body, joe exotic, and after that came out, they came to me and said, hey, we'd like to do a scripted series, which is what you were just trying to describe scripted series.
Carol Baskin: 28:01
There we go and they wanted to pay me for my life's rights. And I said we'll come back after I pass the bill, because my life's not over yet and it won't be until this bill is passed. And so they said, well, we're going to do it without you anyway. So they did.
Matt Fox: 28:14
Ah, damn it, Wow Ah big cats are just so important to the environment, to the the circle of life, if you will give me sorry about hollywood all right anyway um, wow.
Jamie Flanagan: 28:29
So so I'm talking about you. You give so much, and matt wants to talk about the, the philanthropic work that you do and I'm curious how you fund the whole project how do you get these millions of dollars to take care of these critters?
Matt Fox: 28:42
as a financial wellness coordinator. You know that's what I do on a daily basis, on a nine to five, and I talk about the whole budgeting, savings and being philanthropic. If you want to put that into your budget, if somebody wanted to, you know, help you and donate to your cause. What are some of the things that? Where would they go to find you to do that?
Carol Baskin: 29:02
They could go to big cat, riskyorg slash, donate and, like I said, we do have to raise between three and a half and $4 million. It's all done through private donations. I don't write grants. I don't know how I tried, I was no good at it. There is no government money for this, there's no subsidies for it, even though it's the government causing the problem by not fixing this by passing this bill that all of these sanctuaries are having to deal with these huge cons.
Carol Baskin: 29:28
So it's private donors of $25, $50 a piece and we used to be open to the public, so that was about a million dollars a year. Of our revenue came from giving guided tours and then at the end of the guided tour we'd twist their arm to go call their member of Congress. So we're working out on both giving all of those people about 27,000 people a year to call their member of Congress. We're using out because the cats can catch COVID, so we can't open back up and it's been really difficult to make up that shortfall. So I did get paid for Dancing with the Stars, I get paid for my cameos and that's helping to make up that shortfall.
Matt Fox: 30:05
The whole COVID-19, that's like a zoonotic thing, isn't it? Because we can't catch it from the animals, but they can catch it from us.
Marty: 30:14
We can catch it from me, but I won't go there. That's a different topic.
Jamie Flanagan: 30:17
That's a different topic.
Carol Baskin: 30:19
You could have a whole podcast on that whole thing.
Matt Fox: 30:22
Right right, right right. But when someone wanted to donate, it's just not just feeding the cats, but there's might might be a monthly subscription that somebody can do, or they can adopt a cat that they're interested in learning more about. Is there those? Those are programs that are out there, correct?
Carol Baskin: 30:37
There are. You can sponsor our cats at different levels and it gets you different levels of you know, like an 8x10 picture or downloadable picture, and we have a website for our store where you can buy merchandise and such at bigcatrescuebiz.
Matt Fox: 30:53
Awesome. I love that. I really do.
Jamie Flanagan: 30:57
So you had the idea about cams in the wild. I remember God, it was probably 10, 15 years ago or 10 years ago now.
Matt Fox: 31:06
Were you videoing Kirby at the time?
Jamie Flanagan: 31:07
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no there was like one of the biggest cams. It was one of the first early cams, it was like on an eagle's nest and it was like the biggest live stream ever We've seen camels born on camels, but it was just this eagle's nest. It was one of the early ones. People were just enamored with these baby eagles and just watching them.
Matt Fox: 31:28
Giraffes it was a baby giraffe.
Jamie Flanagan: 31:31
Waiting for those baby giraffes. That was a big thing. So people will buy into this and people will give you their time and have their eyeballs on it and you're going to have the ads running around the sides. Do you have anything going like that now at Big Cat Rescue, where people can peer in on the critters at your place and contribute and see and tour the place virtually?
Carol Baskin: 31:52
We provide all of that for free because we want to drive demand for that.
Carol Baskin: 31:57
So right now we have over a dozen live webcams on different enclosures at the sanctuary and some of we had two vacation areas, so the cats that are in those enclosures those two enclosures are always different cats every couple of weeks, so people get to see a lot of our different cats as they're rotated through that space. And you can find all of those cameras at bigcatrescueorg slash cams C-A-M-S. We are in the process of installing 30 more of those and I had already committed to that before COVID, so I'm having to pay for it, whether I can afford it or not. But the good news is people will be able to see more of our cats as those cameras are all coming online and we also put out every week. We put out a new video on our YouTube channel, but we also put out a new immersive video as our regular files, because people are mesmerized when they're looking at a cat while it's eating and they can actually see up inside that cat's mouth and they can hear the crunching of the bones and it's just miserable.
Jamie Flanagan: 33:12
It's really an amazing experience Nice, do you like to?
Matt Fox: 33:20
listen to people chew.
Jamie Flanagan: 33:22
Jay, I do Like an.
Matt Fox: 33:23
ASMR thing going on in there.
Jamie Flanagan: 33:25
One of my favorite things. One of my favorite things. So, Carol, where are you in Big Cat Rescue going to be in the next handful of years? Where is it going to be?
Carol Baskin: 33:38
My ultimate goal is to put ourselves out of business.
Jamie Flanagan: 33:40
Nice.
Carol Baskin: 33:40
There shouldn't have to be sanctuaries rescuing cats from horrible situations. We can just end those horrible situations. We do rehab and release of native bobcats and native cougars. Those are the only cats who can go free.
Jamie Flanagan: 33:55
You let loose some of the Michigan Panthers on us, did you?
Marty: 34:00
You let that Michigan.
Carol Baskin: 34:00
Panther go on us, not my cat.
Matt Fox: 34:08
No, because they have a bobcat rescue as well. Yeah, yeah.
Jamie Flanagan: 34:11
What's the lifespan of a big cat when it's cared for well?
Carol Baskin: 34:16
A big cat rescue. Our cats live into their late teens and early 20s. Our oldest cat was just, I think, a month shy of being 30. But in the wild and in other zoos and sanctuaries they only usually live to be 10 or 12.
Jamie Flanagan: 34:30
Okay, so you could feasibly put yourself out of business. If this legislation is successful, feasibly within the next 20 years you could be happily out of business, which would be great.
Matt Fox: 34:42
Best answer I've heard. Yeah, honestly.
Jamie Flanagan: 34:46
All right, anything that we missed, anything about the legislation or contacting people. So what's the contact? Thebigcatactorg yes Dot com.
Carol Baskin: 34:59
Bigcatactcom.
Jamie Flanagan: 35:00
Bigcatactcom and that will get you connected, to connect with your legislators quickly and easily through many platforms. Marty, anything else that, anything else we need to cover.
Marty: 35:10
Yeah, I've got a really quick, quick, funny story for you while Carol was here, so I love stories, marty.
Marty: 35:16
I know you guys. We were walking into the US Senate yesterday afternoon and we I didn't have my glasses on and Carol was in front of us and our other two colleagues that were lobbying with us and we're walking head on so I couldn't really see. It was in front of us without my glasses and there's apparently like 30 people with a camera each, like you know, photographers from Bloomberg and Politico and all these different outlets and we were walking in the same office as the new supreme court nominee while she was being interviewed by the chair of the judiciary and who's hugely involved in this, so we thought there was this whole crew there for carol baskin.
Jamie Flanagan: 35:53
35 and they were there.
Marty: 35:55
But then then of course they took, you know, 100 pictures of us. So if you go on getty, now there's this great film role of what what they've put out there of our just walking into this office. It's really kind of hilarious. And it was an interesting story, especially at this time in the world. What's going on with? You know we can say we were there for when history was made.
Matt Fox: 36:16
So I'm just envisioning Austin Powers in the background. Yes, yes, yes, no, no, no.
Carol Baskin: 36:21
That's what I've been visiting with all the cameras.
Matt Fox: 36:23
You know all the clicks happening.
Jamie Flanagan: 36:25
Oh, that's great. You sent us a link, we'll link that in the podcast description.
Carol Baskin: 36:29
Thank you for that, Marty.
Matt Fox: 36:30
So yeah, we'll put that in there.
Marty: 36:32
Awesome.
Matt Fox: 36:33
This has been time very well spent, Jamie. Yeah yeah, carol, marty, your time is absolutely fantastic. It is, you know, whenever, wherever you listen to the Animal Talk Radio, you know like subscribe all that fun stuff, but it is a Thursday evening in the month of March in 2022. This COVIDian timeline has really taken a lot of folks you know by a lot of surprise, but what you are doing and the work that you're putting into this, don't stop. Please don't stop what you're doing. I want you out of business, girl.
Marty: 37:05
Honestly Well, thank you guys for having us. We really appreciate. You guys are always so awesome and done so many shows with us, and having Carol on, I know, has been a special treat. She's such a fantastic advocate and there really is no one I think I've ever met that's more dedicated to an issue I yeah, yeah, it's just I appreciate both of your times.
Jamie Flanagan: 37:25
It's uh, I know you've been. It's been a long, long, long, long couple of weeks there in washington, so thank you, thank you and uh yeah that's it, we'll see you guys, uh like, subscribe, leave a comment and uh thanks again.
Marty: 37:38
Thank you guys very much facebook now and and we're see where it aired yep, yep yep, yeah, stick around after, stick around for a couple seconds afterwards we're going to end the broadcast here.
Matt Fox: 37:46
But uh, thank you. Everyone appreciate your time there it is.
Jamie Flanagan: 37:50
Thank you guys.
