Puma Enrichment (The Big Cat Sanctuary)

 The Big Cat Sanctuary LifeStyle

At Smarden, in Kent, the Big Cat Sanctuary is set in the heart of the countryside.

Under the European Endangered Species Breeding Programme, the peace and tranquility of the site offer refuge and excellent conditions for the active breeding of beautiful but endangered cats, both large and small.

Peter Sampson and the Sampson family's vision was the Big Cat Sanctuary; they should be given immense credit for their passion and dedication to bring this dream alive and appreciation of their continuing support and passion for the charity.

Animal abusers dislike us because, by banning the private ownership of exotic cats, we are the main sanctuary committed to ending the violence at its core. In order to make people believe that we breed, purchase, sell, and encourage public interaction (just as they always do), these big cat abusers makeup lies or distort the facts. We've never owned tigers or lions. In 1994, our first kitten was born, and in 1997, we stopped breeding. There were a couple of incidents involving old cats and hybrids that we didn't think were fertile, but the last cat born here in 2001 was a leopard cat. Both of his parents were in their late teens and felt they were too old to breed. We have rescued more than 200 exotic cats as of 2015. There are 13 of us who were born here.

In 2003, we stopped allowing public contact. Only public interaction was permitted to show people who thought they wanted a wild cat as a pet, that all the cat wanted to do was pee on you. The same message didn't get through the sharing of those images online, so we stopped. Since it is dangerous and sends a negative message, we stopped allowing our workers to touch the cats in 2004. Sadly, many otherwise pretty good sanctuaries still want to show off that way and we feel it affects our attempts to avoid public communication.

As outlined in How We Started, the sanctuary began when the quest to buy a pet bobcat kitten unwittingly took us to a "fur farm" that sold a few cats as pets but raised them mainly to become fur coats. To save them from being killed, we purchased all 56 kittens.

We naturally turned to those we met, the breeders and owners of exotic animals, to learn how to care for the animals. Initially, under this influence, we believed what you would still hear from the breeders and owners today, i.e. that these cats should be privately owned to "preserve the species," that if properly raised and trained, they would make good pets, and that if you know how to treat them, they are safe. Given the much greater effort, she needed than a domestic cat, our own experience until then with Windsong, my original pet bobcat, had not clashed with these principles. But at that stage, she had not achieved maturity.

Our intention was to sell and give away as many of the fur farm kittens as we could to what we expected to be good homes, believing as we did that the cats were acceptable pets. There was no "profit" to be had, but the sales profits helped cover some of the thousands we had spent buying and now taking care of the cats.

The next four years were a period of tremendous work taking care of the cats, learning about their needs, learning about the world of exotic pet trading and ownership, learning about the wild problems that the cats face, and a gradual but drastic evolutionary shift in my thought and beliefs. The shift took place as our experience expanded. When my husband Don showed signs of mental decline, likely due to brain damage sustained years ago in a small plane crash, these years also became a time of personal struggle.

When we attended animal auctions, we found that taxidermists were many of the bidders. The animals that went for low prices will be bid on. These were usually the ones in the poorest shape. Then, before taking them home to ride, they would take them to the parking lot and club them to death. So we began outlawing them so that we could save the cats from that fate. The cats were usually in poor health. We'd nurse them back to health, then sell them to buyers who we hoped would be willing to give them good homes.

To keep them out of poor circumstances or save them from certain death, other cats were bought. For instance, at an auction where the owners were obviously feeding the curdled milk that she struggled to spit out, we first saw Sarabi the lioness as a five-week-old cub. We couldn't bear seeing her and we bought her.

Then we found more and more during these years that cats we thought we put in good homes were not "working out." People called asking if we were going to take them back. We did so with few exceptions because we couldn't bear the prospect of alternatives. Then, at an auction, I saw a lynx that I was sure I remembered as a kitten that before we sold him as a pet, I had nurtured and kept alive. He was thin, frightened, and recognized me clearly.

During these years, as these encounters increased, it became increasingly apparent that many of the cats at the auctions were actually unwanted pets. People will get them as young kittens, for a few years, they would be fairly manageable and become problem-friendly as they matured. Or individuals would not know how much work they were buying them and dump them until they matured.

In their first year, in particular, I started to read and hear about "high mortality rates" for exotic pets. This was consistent with the many calls I received from people with dying kittens. Most of this occurs in their lives very early on. Usually, kittens are taken from mothers shortly after birth in order to get a cat to "bond" with a human. The entity becomes the mother, but without the instincts and devices to be. When, like Faith, a Florida bobcat, and Aries, Artemis and Orion, the Idaho cougar cubs whose mother was shot by a hunter, we receive orphaned kittens from the wild today, the scariest and most dangerous period in those early weeks, except for those of us who have extensive kitten experience. And at least those orphaned cats from the wild had the value of a few weeks of mother's milk and treatment. One common cause of death is the lack of awareness of the owners about how to feed them properly in the bottle.

When I saw first-hand how complicated and costly it was to give these cats what I considered to be a decent home, and I saw how many ended up or were discarded in poor conditions, I thought that people should be discouraged from having them as pets. I wrote a 100-page book in 1994, and I made a home video in 1995 about caring for cats and what it was like to have them as animals. I thought that people who wanted cats as animals were not likely to read or see anything that was trying to persuade them not to do so. But if they saw how much work it was, it would deter the people most likely to abandon them from having them at all, and at least provide an opportunity to handle those exotic cats that were bought as pets in a way that would encourage them to thrive. For the same reason today, we keep the chapters of the book on our website.

In addition to buying cats, we had begun to breed some cats under the mistaken idea that this was a way to "preserve the species." With this in mind, a few of our cats were bought, but we were invariably also offering them a home much better than what they were meant for if we did not buy them. I didn't find out what seems so clear to me today that breeding an animal that was supposed to roam free for life in a cage was inherently cruel, and that most of the "homes" these animals would end up in situations where they would live in unacceptable circumstances. We believe these cats should not be pets.

Around 13 percent of the cats we house today were born in those early years at the sanctuary. Some were put, then returned or abandoned, with pet owners. A few have never left. At times, we have referred to both of them as "pet trade" or "former pets" since we were part of the pet trade at that time. Whether or not they were born here, the point of their tale remains the same. They do not make pets that are healthy, and they should not be bred to be pets.

In the meantime, news spread rapidly that we were providing exotic cats with a home, and we began getting calls asking us to take cats that people didn't want, which we did. Cats came because the owners said they could not manage them (Shadow and Sugar cougars), or the owners got sick (China Doll the tigress), or the owners got divorced (Cody and Missouri cougars), or they were used to perform acts and no longer wanted to (Shaquille the black leopard), or the cat interfered with their social life (Squeaker the cougar), or they moved (Banshee the bob card) or they moved (Banshee the bob card). And if we didn't take them, we realized they were likely to end up being lost or sold at auctions or to exhibitors.

As I arrived at the realization that exotic cats should not be pets or bred for a life in captivity, I also had to contend with the fact that the mental health of my husband was worsening. The sanctuary was influenced by this because he enjoyed the sight of kittens. I was still faithful to my husband thought I had come to feel strongly that the breeding was incorrect. I knew he was not going to succumb to this, and I was reluctant to wreck our marriage over it. I neutered and spayed the cats as best as I could, but I was unable to persuade him to quit breeding completely.

I had never heard of Alzheimer's Disease, but one of the volunteers in his family who had dealt with it told me that Don displayed conduct that was suggestive of that. I made an appointment for him to be seen by a specialist. But, one week before the appointment, one morning, he left home and never returned.

Related Tags: 

#Sanctuary, #Puma Enrichment (The Big Cat Sanctuary), #Funny Crazy BIG CAT SOUNDS!, #The Big Cat Sanctuary, #Puma Enrichment, #big cats, #puma, #puma animal, #jaguars, #puma