None of the people who make their living from breeding, exploiting and discarding dangerous animals will like this new law, but any real sanctuary, or real animal lover will see that it is a very necessary first step. This bill requires the owners to take responsibility for their animals by posting a bond or carrying insurance. You have to have insurance to drive a car, so it only makes sense that if you are going to keep animals in your backyard that can kill and maim, you should have to take some sort of financial precaution. It costs more than 5000.00 a year to properly care for just one large cat, and many of these same people who are whining wouldn’t even think twice about breeding another litter of tiger cubs, or “rescuing” another lion. They just don’t want to be held accountable if someone gets hurt or if they decide to walk away from the whole thing when it is no longer fun or profitable. To see a video of what many of these facilties look like go to: http://www.veoh.com/videos/v853340GHFGdrrh

Carole, please, your ignorance and propaganda is baseless. Have you had any escapes, mauls, or injuries lately at your “rescue” facility? Do you not think state officals take notice to your lies and manipulations, especially of the facts? Your a disgrace in the name of animal conservation. Hippocrisy is common in the world, and your a prime example of it.

Man, I smell stench. Oh, Big Rat Rescue has posted! Any new lies today Baskin?

I usually refrain from commenting on anything that Carole Baskin has to say but since freedom of speech is a right that we still manage to have in 2007, here goes: Let’s see breeding, exploiting and discarding exotic big cats–something that Ms. Baskin is well known for–why is Ms. Baskin still in business? I guess the breeding of another tiger litter was not as profitable for Ms. Baskin as running her “so called sanctuary”–no, the donations and corporate sponsorships that are afforded to sanctuaries was much more lucrative and attractive to someone who is consumed with so much greed and hypocracy.

To penalize individuals who take excellent care of their exotic cats by asking them to now carry insurance is grossly unfair. Ms. Baskin’s facility has a history of maulings–she and others like her are the ones who should suffer the consequences of their inability to care for exotic cats.

Carole reminds me of Cartman from South Park. Short, wide, whiney, annoying, and greedy. I wish I had a clip of her saying…”Moommmmmmmmmm”, I want myyyy tigerrrsss, instead of “Mom, I want Cheesey poofs!” lol

Screw you guys, I’m going home!

as for the underhanded way the mammals were put on the reptile bill–well, that’s politics as usual anymore there is a term politians use for covering their S+++++ but i can’t remember it–as they can’t remember who or why it was done—just a FAVOR for a rich constiuent. money talks—animal owners pay the price. we should all remember these characters at election time–they need to be in jail not in office. someone needs to investigate them

Carole Lewis Baskin from Bigcat Rescue calls her facility a ‘Sanctuary’, but she is nothing more than an exhibitor making a living off her animals. She has bought, breed, and sold animals for years and along the way saw the writings on the wall when the animal rights’ groups steadily became more powerful.

Her strategy changed. Instead of making a living off the animals she breed, she decided to call herself a sanctuary which houses the many animals she has breed or bought. Carole uses deception to obtain funds from the unsuspecting public by claiming abuse of animals that she herself has puchased. Some of her animals she claims were abandoned, but the tuth is she is being paid large sums of money to house these animals. She didn’t rescue them, she is boarding them.

She is not an advocate for animals, her desire is to be the only facility standing in Florida where the public can view these animals up close and personal for a fee. She doesn’t care that thousands of animals may be in jeopardy of euthanasia by the Reptile Bill she diligently pursued to have passed.

For those of you readers that don’t know of Ms. Lewis Baskin, please be careful of supporting a facility that is financially rich. Monies came from her deceased husband who was reported mssing and never found, and from the poor unsuspecting public that give donations based on false abuse claims of animals.

Those of us who live (before and after the big cats arrived) next to the Carole Stairs Lewis Baskin Big Cat collection formerly known as Wildlife on Easy Street would like to know why those that support this breeding compound, and more importantly, the officials of Hillsborough County… feel this place should be allowed to remain in such a heavily populated residential community!! What about the prior escapes and injuries at that place not to mention the constant nose burning eye watering stench of all that cat piss in the air. And what ever happened to Jack Donald Lewis, Carole’s much older former millionaire husband? Why can’t any one seem to locate his whereabouts or remains? Why has Carole refused to take a lie detector test? Where is CSI and 48 hours??

Another thing to ponder: Horses kill humans of all ages quite regularly. Let us confront this fact NOW instead of when the animal rights activists decide to dictate to us. EVERY excuse for banning possession of tigers applies to banning possession of horses. Neither animal is inherently “safe” by the most uptight of standards. Yet find me even one accusation that minors or the public are put in danger when a totally untrained person possesses a horse or walks it in public. Find me people who demand that paranoid precautions be taken because a “dangerous” 1,000 pound horse is somewhere near children.

Even if the animal rights activists fail to take us down that road to banning possession of horses and dogs, and mandatory spay/neuter is pretty close to a ban on possession because where will most families get dogs, it is still wrong because discriminating against the owners of tigers denies them equal protection as guaranteed by that U.S. constitution that some people place beneath their agendas. We tolerate what horses do to people for very good reasons and a lot of that is for the sake of the horses. We can tolerate what tigers occasionally do to humans for the sake of the tigers. Look at the hype really hard because the people who pretend to love tigers keep trying to get people to get rid of them because tigers are allegedly very dangerous. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist. Animal rights activists sell, often enough, the idea that any animal’s life is worth more than a human life, and in a conversation like this they will deny the same thing that is easy to find in quoted material from speeches and pamphlets. Let’s stick with the often quoted lines about a child’s life being the same as a rat’s or whatever.

If that is the case, then the loss of one human’s life only justifies the loss of one animal’s life, if that. Horses aren’t always killed for killing humans. For someone who advocates the worth of animal lives to say that we have to destroy all of a species for being dangerous, something screwy has to be going on.

My position is that captive tigers are only a little bit dangerous. This is just like horses are a little bit dangerous, your car is a little bit dangerous, and life is worth the risks that you have to take to live it. The worth of an animal can be weighed against the worth of a human, and even if you subscribe to the idea that an animal is always worth less than a human, it has some worth. To justify the destruction of tigers because of the risk to humans, one must assume that tigers are worthless. Every organization that wants tigers out of private hands has failed one big test. They have failed to make every possible effort to rehome the displaced tigers. It’s too late now. They’ve already shown the lack of quality of their thought. If animals had rights, then each animal would have the right to an opportunity to continue to live and to reproduce. We have animal rights activists denying the basic rights of animals and telling people that the animals are too dangerous to be around humans at the same time that they say that the animals are worth more than humans are.

It’s better just to throw out the animal rights activists. I believe Carole Baskin when she says that she is out to scam the rest of us. PETA and the HSUS, essentially the same organization, certainly have, and Baskin keeps bringing the HSUS into this stuff in Florida.

I believe the July 25, 2007, 11:39 am post by someone named “Carole Baskin” was not from Carole Baskin of Big Cat Rescue. Some of the other posts contain outdated information (e.g. “spend the night in a cabin tours” — that was eliminated a long time ago). If you are able to find anything at http://www.bigcatrescue.org that talks about spending the night in a cabin — or many other things people have mentioned in posts — it’s because the web site has been around a very long time (has thousands of web pages) and is only sporadically maintained by non-professionals. Not everything has been removed from the web site that should have been. I think you would be hard-pressed — starting at the home page — to navigate to any page containing old information, but yes if you spend enough time on the web site you’ll stumble across a page that hasn’t been updated.

I’ve been a volunteer at Big Cat Rescue for almost two years. No one who has first-hand knowledge of the Big Cat Rescue as it is today would make the terrible accuastions some have made here. I can honestly say “you don’t know what you’re talking about”!

As far as Carole Baskin’s past actions, don’t we all have things in our past that we wouldn’t do if we knew then what we know now? Please take at look at “History and Evolution” which describes how and why Ms. Baskin’s thinking has changed over the years: http://www.bigcatrescue.org/historyandevolution.htm

There are obviously people posting here who have a deep, personal grudge against Carole Baskin. I can only hope you expend half as much energy on taking care of your animals as you do attacking her and Big Cat Rescue.

Response to Patricia:
I can honestly say “YOU don’t know what YOU are talking about”!
We DO spend time with our animals and take good care of them however, we would have MUCH more time to spend with them if we did not have to keep on top of trying to protect them from those such as Carole Baskin who are trying very hard to take them away from us.
Unlike what Carole preaches, many owners DO NOT disgard their cats, nor would they ever plan to regardless of any ‘unpleasant’ behavior the animal may start to exhibit. Many do not breed or sell them and most have a plan established in the unfortunate event the owner can no longer care for their animal(s) i.e.; a fellow experienced licensed animal person who has agreed to care for the animal if/when the need should occur.
Please explain to me why you and Carole feel that ALL owners should NOT be allowed to have them in the safe privacy of their own home?
WE can only hope YOU, Carole and many other groups would spend YOUR time concerned with bad owners and leave the majority of us, who are totally responsible with no violations and spend our OWN money caring for the animals we dedicate our lives to.
Why do you keep attacking US and trying to take away our animals? Many will end up DEAD (euthanized) if total bans are passed. Is that what you would prefer? Would you rather see all these felines, many who are endangered, end up in a dumpster, cremated, stuffed for museums or rendered into dog and cat food instead of living a safe happy long life with those that love them?

Patricia said, “As far as Carole Baskin’s past actions, don’t we all have things in our past that we wouldn’t do if we knew then what we know now? Please take at look at “History and Evolution” which describes how and why Ms. Baskin’s thinking has changed over the years…”

Patricia, what you may not know is that Carole’s ‘Evolution of Thought’ (as she originally called this piece) appeared only after her fraud was exposed by Bay News 9. This was necessary to explain away why Carole stated that cats were ‘born into the pet trade’ when they were actually bred and born at BCR. The website was copied before these changes were made as proof of the changes, and these CMA (cover my ass ) changes continue, some even posted today after reading some of these comments.

When the Bay News 9 expose’ aired Carole rushed to change her web site in an attempt to cover up her guilt. Where her home page used to state that she was a ‘home for abused and abandoned cats” It next stated only that she was a ‘retirement home” for cats. What happened to the abused and abandoned cats? Could it be that they never existed?

Where her web site stated that a cat was ‘born into the pet trade’ Carole rushed to add her “Evolution of Thought’ explaining that she used to be the pet trade, before her thoughts ‘evolved.’ A large number of the cats listed on her website as ‘rescues’ were actually bought for her stated desire to own and commercially exhibit the largest collection of exotic cats in the world. Nowhere does she admit this of course but she finally did admit that “a small fraction” (about one quarter) of her cats were actually bred and born there. One has to wonder why Carole doesn’t simply say that these cats were bred and born at Big Cat Rescue instead of counting on people to click on a link for her new ‘explanation’. My guess is that she would then look like she was trying to hide this fact….which she was….and is.

Many cats were purchased at exotic animal auctions where Carole originally claimed she ‘paid their ransom’ to ‘rescue’ them. Her post expose’ version of this story is that she bought them from auctions because she saw owners bottle feeding them curdled milk (this would ‘explain’ why most purchased were just babies) or because she saw taxidermists clubbing them to death in the parking lot (in front of Carole mind you) before taking them home to mount them.

This is Carole’s most ridiculous cover-up to date. Talk to a taxidermist. You don’t mount a cat that has had it’s face and fur destroyed by a club, and milk always looks curdled when you add the baby cereal. Look for this story and others to change now, if they haven’t already; or at least get a new ‘explanation.’ The truth is, these cats were bought to be re-sold for a profit, bred, or kept by Carole for her collection, and the paperwork supports this.

Still other cats said to have been ‘rescued from fur farms’ were cubs bought to be sold as pets or breeders. If they were ‘rescued’, where are they now? For the first time (since the expose’) Carole’s web site now admits that these animals were indeed bought with the intention of selling them. They were not ‘rescues’ as she claimed for so many years. If she truly wanted to ‘rescue’ cats from fur farms she would have taken home older cats ready to be harvested (killed) for their fur; not 56 little cubs that could be bottle raised, imprinted on humans, and sold as pets. If I remember correctly, after reading this statement Carole then added to her story, claiming that they later rescued the adult cats too. It is hard to keep up with her lies as she has to keep posting new ones to cover up the old.

As late as 2004 a volunteer at BCR tells us he visited Carole at her home and saw that she had a Jungle Cat as a housepet, yet Carole wants to forbid this for everyone but herself. Whether or not you support the responsible ownership of exotics, I would hope that you would not support the lies, deceit, and fraud this woman has been for years perpetrated on the naive animal lovers who financially support her.

Since being publicly exposed, Carole’s web site has under gone some drastic changes. This is why the original version of the website was copied before the expose’….. to reveal Carole’s feeble attempts to cover her a## , which to us is just more evidence of her guilt.

When investigative reporter Chris Hawes asked to copy Carole’s paperwork, her request was denied. Carole said her opponents could ‘zero in on’ parts that could be used against her. If Carole had nothing to hide, that is exactly what could be used against her….nothing.

Remember, Bay News 9 attorneys went over hundreds of documents before allowing this piece to air. Chris Hawes was offered a ‘dream job’ in Texas, in part for the investigative work she did on this story. Carole is married to an attorney, yet no attempt was ever made to sue for what Carole refers to as slander. Ask yourself why.

There is also the problem of the blood on Carole Baskin’s hands. If she had been genuinely concerned about what happened to the animals she would have taken meticulous care that no animals had to die because of losing their homes. Instead she seems to have taken meticulous care to maximize the number of animal deaths.

I agree with Zuzana to kill bills and the reasons she stated. I also believe for every bill like this passed Americans are losing their freedom. I believe I have a right to own an exotic animal as long as I take care of it properly and it is not a threat to the neighbors. But unless everyone bans together we will lose one freedom after another till you won’t even be able to own a domestic cat or dog. That is exactly where the AR groups are going with all this. If there’s a group in Florida I’ll join it.

People do NOT have the right to keep what they want. Infact no one has the right to put their neighbors in danger from an escaped cobra ,etc .

These bills/laws are weak EVERY venemous reptile/invert should be banned-big constrictors-big lizards and most exotic mammals who can transmit diseases or wound/kill if escape .

Its unreal that anyone with a family would even consider such “pets” . Goes to show how much they “love” their kids and respect their neighbors .

Lia writes, “I agree HOWEVER tigers-Venemous reptiles ,primates,etc are a BIG danger to your neighbors . If the animals isnt a danger than by all means have it.”

Lia, how is reptile, cat or primate kept by a trained, licensed, reponsible owner in a safe FWC approved cage or enclosure any more dangerous to a neighbor than the neighbor’s dog is to them? Look at the statistics. For instance….

17-20 people a year (mostly children) die from dog bites.
0 people a year die from an encounter with a primate.

When someone is injured by an exotic it is always the owner or handler or someone who has made the choice to GO TO the facility where the animal is housed. If you are fearful of exotic animals it is very simple….do not go to where they are housed and you will not be hurt. There has NEVER been a case of an ESCAPED exotic killing someone.

If you love animals, please educate yourself to the facts before you make fearful statements like those of the animal rights people. This site has lots of TRUTHFUL information and statistics…..http://www.rexano.org/

Remember, dogs… even horses….cause more injuries than exotics. Support a ban on our freedom to own a big cat or primate and eventually you will be fighting to keep the animal of YOUR choice.

I think that “Not Carole Baskin” really was Carole Baskin.

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