100 Things Howie Brought Into My World or The First 12 Years
Howie Anniversary 100 things I didn't have before you.
The day I met you:
Some of our cats still lived in small runs in the parking lot and on concrete.
We had 10,000 visitors and were down 12% from the year before due to 9/11. 2002
We had never created an annual report. 2002
Our name was Wildlife on Easy Street and didn't say what we did. 2003
There was no prohibition on selling and transporting big cats across state lines. 2003
We had no audited statements and could not qualify for larger grants. Our largest outside gift had been $10,000. 2003
Our gift shop was a single room in a 1970's trailer and our register was a tool box in a metal cage. 2003
Our front gate was a chain link panel that kept falling off the tracks. 2003
We had never had radio ads. 2003
No retailer had ever proudly announced they would cease to carry fur. 2004
People still defanged and declawed big cats to make them more pliable for cub handling. 2004
We didn't have proper zoning and were in danger of developers running us off. 2004
We didn't have an Admin branch of the Volunteer Program. 2004
We didn't have an Intern Program. 2004
We didn't have an Operant Conditioning Program. 2004
We didn't have an Education Director. 2004
We didn't have a Point of Sale program. 2004
We didn't have a way to connect our supporters to their lawmakers. 2004
Food prep was a truck body with one row of sinks, one row of tables, and 6 people slinging machetes. We could only store a couple days' food. 2004
We didn't have a dumpster, so we had to carry hundreds of pounds of trash each day to the end of the street and clean up the mess made by people and animals. 2004
We had not yet been reviewed by Charity Navigator, but achieved their highest rating right out of the gate. 2004
There was no national conference for animal advocacy. 2005
We had never had a golf tournament. 2005
We needed to increase our budget for whole prey so we could rehab our first baby bobcat, named Faith. 2005
We didn't have a recycling program. 2005
We had never had a $10,000 in tours. 2005
We had no rear entrance and were trapped if a tree fell across Easy Street. 2005
We had never created and sold a Big Cat Calendar. 2005
We had never had a corporate giving campaign. 2005
We had never been able to qualify for the Federal Combined Federal Campaign. 2006
Ringling had never attempted a season without tiger acts. 2006
We had never been listed in Charity Guide's List of Volunteer Opportunities. 2006
YouTube didn't exist. We had no regular video presence online. 2006
People were petting, hand feeding, swimming with and having their photos made with adult lions and tigers. 2007
It was still legal to walk lions, tigers, leopards and cougars on leashes in public. 2007
Federal rules were finally written to enforce the 2003 Captive Wildlife Safety Act. 2007
There had never been an online resource that showed where big cats were kept. 2007
The USDI had never defined a sanctuary as a place that did not buy, breed, sell, trade nor allow public contact. 2007
Florida did not require any sort of liability insurance or bond for Class I owners. 2007
We had never been able to rally advocates enough to halt a big cat exhibit at a fair. 2007
We had never been in U.S. News and World Report. 2007
We could not afford a proper cemetery nor memorial plaques for our cats. 2007
We had not been able to provide meaningful conservation funding for snow leopards, African wildlife nor South American ecosystems. 2007
We had never had our PSA's run on T.V. 2007
We didn’t have a rehab cage that was state of the art. 2007
We didn't have worker's comp, so we only had 3 employees. 2008
No country had yet banned the use of big cats in circus acts. 2008
We had never been a finalist for CFO of the year. 2008
Our perimeter wall had been a hodgepodge of chain link until our first solid wall began to go up after 4 years of fundraising. 2008
We had never been featured in Encyclopedia Britannica before. 2008
There had never been a comprehensive study on captive tigers until TRAFFIC quoted us extensively in Paper Tigers. 2008
Our website had never been available in any language other than English. 2008
There was no law against killing wild animals by remote control over the Internet. 2008
Tony the truck stop tiger had never had a lawyer before. Nor had any other exotic cat. 2008
We didn't have a Legacy Society and had not been effectively soliciting bequests. 2008
There was no Twitter. 2008
White tigers were all the rage because Siegfried & Roy were deceiving the public into thinking they were Royal White Bengal tigers and zoos were breeding them because the public would pay to see them. 2009
There were no written standards for sanctuary accreditation. 2009
We didn't have a consolidated Intranet site for storing documents, training staff & volunteers and recording animal records and observations. 2009
CITES had never clearly stated "operations breeding tigers on a commercial scale shall implement measures to restrict the captive population to a level supportive only to conserving wild tigers; tigers should not be bred for trade in their parts and derivatives. 14.69" after we funded the Tiger Coalition's presence. 2009
In Florida people could still have Cougars as pets. 2009
We didn't have FIOS high speed Internet. 2009
We didn't have security cameras. 2009
We didn't have a fenced parking lot to keep people from getting out of their cars and getting in trouble. 2009
We had never had a member voted Citizen of the Year by the chamber of commerce. 2009
We had never been able to afford a development person. 2009
We had never had a credit card program where our cats were featured and user's were able to donate with every purchase. 2009
Facebook didn't exist. 2009
The Florida Legislature had never had to force the Florida Wildlife Commission to enforce their own rule, re: the 10k bond for Class I animals. 2010
PetSmart had never taken a position and banned exotic cats from their stores in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. 2010
We had never won national awards for Best Non Profit. 2010
In Florida Bobcats could be legally used as bait in fenced areas where hunting dogs were trained to chase them down and rip them to shreds; all in the name of good, clean, family fun. 2010
There was no major animal welfare organization that understood the big cat crises was caused by cub handling. 2011
There was no one drawing the obvious line between cubs handled by tourists and lions killed in canned hunts. Hardly anyone even knew what a canned hunt was, and even those who did, didn't know that exotic cats were killed that way. 2011
There had never been a coalition of major animal protection groups working together to save the tiger. 2011
We had never had a volunteer hour tracking system, like Volgistics, to accurately account for volunteer hours. 2011
We had a static website but needed a content management system. 2011
We had never won a new truck before. 2011
We had never hosted a sanctuary workshop before. 2011
We didn't have outside professionals on our board of directors. 2011
We didn't have a generator to protect our food supply. 2011
There was no Google Plus. 2011
Malls throughout the midwest had cub handling displays every week of the year. 2012
We didn't have an endowment fund. 2012
We didn't have a Public Relations Director. 2012
Oprah had never taken a stand on fur. 2012
No city had ever banned the sale of fur. 2012
There had never been a federal bill introduced that would ban the private possession and public handling of big cats and their cubs. 2012
We had never been the main sponsor of Taking Action for Animals. 2012
We had never been able to use solar power. 2012
We had never been able to pursue my first passion of saving domestic cats and kittens from euthanasia. 2013
We could never have even considered building a 2.5 acre play yard for the cats. 2013
We had no way to insure our tour guides were giving accurate and relevant tours until implementing the automated tour and Vox system. 2013
We had never orchestrated an advocacy Fly In to D.C. 2013
We had never gotten a million dollar judgment against one of the bad guys. 2013
I had to supplement Big Cat Rescue's payroll. 2013
No one had ever done a study on the state of captive big cats around the world. 2013
I had never been able to go to the Animal Care Expo. 2014
We had never had our own lobbyist. 2014
We had never been able to understand each other on our radios. 2014
We had never had our own X-ray and Sonogram equipment. 2014
We never had a sufficient barrier between us and urban sprawl. 2014
And there was no way I could do much about it because as of the day I met you the sanctuary had been running in the red every year and it was all I could do to keep the cats fed.
The day I met you:
• I suffered from chronic back pain, a psychosomatic symptom of feeling unsupported. I can't remember any lasting back issues since I met you.
• I'd never met a man who loved and supported me.
• I'd never known what it was like to not feel frustrated and angry all the time. I used to journal all the time to try and work out the anger, but have had no reason to write, since meeting you.
• No one ever took me to the beach for my birthday.
• I'd never had anyone make me coffee.
• No one ever spoke from their heart about our love in front of an audience and got choked up when saying, “To love someone is to see the face of God."
I turned this into a printed book for Howie called The First Twelve Years.
Hi, I’m Carole Baskin and I’ve been writing my story since I was able to write, but when the media goes to share it, they only choose the parts that fit their idea of what will generate views. If I'm going to share my story, it should be the whole story. The titles are the dates things happened. If you have any interest in who I really am please start at the beginning of this playlist: http://savethecats.org/
I know there will be people who take things out of context and try to use them to validate their own misconception, but you have access to the whole story. My hope is that others will recognize themselves in my words and have the strength to do what is right for themselves and our shared planet.
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Music (if any) from Epidemic Sound (http://www.epidemicsound.com) This video is for entertainment purposes only and is my opinion.