I am thankful for a service called Jib Jab that makes it easy for me to send funny cards to my family on holidays. It pastes their heads on dancing figures to pop tunes.
My pants are tight, from eating real food for the past several days. I am grateful for the chance to get back to starving myself and exercising so I don’t blow up. Was that a snide note of thanks? I guess so.
I am REALLY thankful to be home from the Big Cat Workshop in Denver, CO. It was a great experience, and I’m excited to create the website below to help the other members.
Dear Ysabel,
If everything is working, I'd like you to spin up a new WP site using either the Shopify hosting or Flywheel hosting, which ever you think best for BigCatTrust.com
I’m thinking about creating a new website that will be used by a coalition of big cat rescue organizations to consolidate our efforts. The reason I'm thinking you might want to spin it up via Shopacity, as there is a very real chance these partners will not use the site, so I hate to be paying for premium hosting at Flywheel, if that turns out to be the case.
There are a number of things it will need to do.
It will need to be able to have several Admins (and maybe different levels of Admin ((i.e. Super Admin who could delete the site, Secondary Admin that can edit pages but not do things like change the theme or add plugins, etc)))
It will have several key areas or categories.
Advocacy
Most important will be a way that all of these organizations can collaborate on the message we want users to distribute. It will be an Advocacy area where we all agree on a bill, like the BigCatAct.com bill. So we would need both a “back end” where we could all put in our edits and then a front facing part to the public. Maybe those would be the same page? Just not published till we all agreed.
The publicly facing page should have the call to action, where we tell people to cut and paste, the agreed upon message, into the email they send, based upon them finding their member of congress at Congress.org
There should be a forum like element in this category where members of the coalition can upload documents, and share ideas that are not visible to the public.
• Shared Info
• This should be visible to all participating sanctuaries, but not the public.
• This will have many subsets, but some would be:
• Veterinary - Where we could share case studies, videos of procedures, lab results. This area should be searchable by species of cats (lions, tigers, ligers, leopards, cougars, bobcats and servals only for now) and by issue, such as dental, blood born, parasites, bones, claws, ears, weird and eyes.
• Caging - supplies and where to find them, cage designs, videos, etc.
• Resources - for sanctuary goods like where to find the best tiger bowls, sharing plans for transport cages, where to buy supplements.
• Staffing
• This should be visible to all participating sanctuaries, but not the public.
• Subsets would be
• Job Openings (part secret but also a publicly visible areas)
• Volunteer and Interns Needed (part secret but also a publicly visible areas) What I mean by that is sanctuaries should be able to tell each other what they are looking for, but there should also be a visible job board to the public that can be found in search)
• Training manuals
• Work contracts
• Documents on worker’s comp, employment disputes, VISA issues
• Rescues
This is probably the most fluid area because there are roughly 20 organizations who all care for cats with the smallest being a place with maybe a dozen cats and several of us with 75-400 cats. What we are trying to figure out is a way that we can tell at a glance, who has room for what when a rescue happens.
Getting people to keep this updated almost needs something like a quarterly reminder to go in and double check each sanctuary’s list of available spaces.
The other thing we need to know is who can transfer cats (who has crates, vehicles, staffing to leave their own place) and that’s an ever changing thing, but some elements are constant and having the ability to upload images would be helpful here too, so we can see what kind of transport trailer, cat wagon, etc., each place has to offer. We tend to do this for each other for free or for a set price of 1.00 to 3.00 per mile, to cover the wear, tear and gas.
It would be helpful for sanctuaries to say what types of cats they can take, i.e.: lions, tigers, leopards, or only small cats. I’d love there to be a census area where sanctuaries update the number of each species they have, and ages, but I don’t know if they would.
Overall: Of course it needs to be mobile friendly and load fast.
Each sanctuary should have a page of their own that is visible to members but not the public where they list all of their contact details and a bit about themselves. Ideally, this should be visible on a map of the U.S. so if there is a cat in need in Georgia, it’s easy to see that Florida might be a lot less travel and stress than going to California.
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.
You can help feed the cats at no cost to you using Amazon Smile!
Visit BigCatRescue.org/Amazon-smile
You can see photos, videos and more, updated daily at BigCatRescue.org
Check out our main channel at YouTube.com/BigCatRescue
Music (if any) from Epidemic Sound (http://www.epidemicsound.com) This video is for entertainment purposes only and is my opinion. Closing graphic with permission from https://youtu.be/F_AtgWMfwrk