EUREKA SPRINGS -- Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge near Eureka Springs will bring in 35 big cats from Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, Fla. to Arkansas, statements from both the Arkansas and the Florida organizations confirm.
Big Cat Rescue is the animal sanctuary featured in the Netflix series "Tiger King." The animals to be moved include tigers, bobcats and lynx, according to a statement from the Tampa organization.
"Big Cat Rescue has entered into an agreement with Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge, an accredited sanctuary in Arkansas, to merge our big cat populations by moving most of Big Cat Rescue's cats to Turpentine Creek," says a statement posted online by Howard Baskin of Big Cat Rescue.
Turpentine Creek confirmed the news on its Facebook page late Wednesday night.
"For 30 years, the mission of Big Cat Rescue has been expressed as having three prongs: to give the best life we could to the cats in our care, to stop the abuse and to avoid extinction of big cats in the wild," the statement says. "For those same thirty years, we have always said that our goal was to 'put ourselves out of business,' meaning that there would be no big cats in need of rescue and no need for the sanctuary to exist."
Big Cat Rescue and Turpentine Creek, among others, successfully sought federal laws through Congress in 2022 to curtail "petting zoos" where tigers and other big cats were bred to supply cubs along with private ownership of these animals as pets.
Those cubs at petting zoos tended to become neglected or abused when they grew too big, Baskin's statement says. The same often happened with pets, the statement says. Success at passing the law, however, resulted in the big cats left, producing little income while their aging required more expense for their care.
"A few decades ago, we had 200 big cats," Baskin's statement says. As recently as 2011, when the group started working on the Big Cat Public Safety Act, the federal legislation], it had 119 big cats. Of those, 89 were over fifteen years old, he said.
Overhead costs such as utilities and maintenance total $1.5 million a year at Big Cat Rescue, Baskin's statement says.
"When we had 100 cats, that $1.5 million in overhead was $15,000 per cat. At 41 cats, it is over $36,000 per cat. As the population declines, it becomes an increasingly inefficient use of donor funds per cat to operate a facility like ours."
"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," Baskin's statement says.
"Turpentine Creek, like Big Cat Rescue, is accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries, which has the highest standards for animal care in the sanctuary field. We have come to know Tanya and Scott Smith who operate Turpentine Creek. They and their staff are closely aligned with us in philosophy and in principles of animal care, and in recognizing the importance of advocacy to pass better laws."
The expense of the move and the building of pens for the animals in Arkansas is expected to cost $1.8 million, according to Baskin's statement. Some of the animals to be moved suffer from serious health conditions such as cancer, the statement says.
"Construction on the new enclosures at Turpentine Creek has begun and is expected to take six months," the statement says, with the first cats moving into the first-completed tiger enclosures as early as July.
Statement by Howard Baskin of Big Cat Rescue on the merger:
https://bigcatrescue.org/merger/
Confirmation from Turpentine Creek:
https://www.facebook.com/TurpentineCreekWildlifeRefuge
The story was updated to correct the number of cats the Refuge will receive.