Some of their animals also look downright obese. (I have not been picky with these images.)
Yes, that cage is at TWAS. Tiny, barren concrete, is that the tiger’s only indoor shelter? Also, that gap below looks suspicious. The tiger could grab a foot from there.
This is not a comment on “which is worse”. I don’t know everything about the husbandry in each facility, and it’s quite possible many of these animals have better lives here than where they came from, though not as good as advertised. They have no moral high ground on to stand and criticize zoos.
My point is that they’re lying, misrepresenting, and this whole hypocrite animal scamtuary industry, they lobby to destroy good facilities (not talking about the GW Zoo here) and private owners, to take their animals that had better lives at their original homes.
And then their animals are obese and live in subpar enclosures. (Or as in the case of Big Cat Rescue, live in tiny, round cages held together by tiny metal hoops and have to lay down in mud during the rainy season and have to drink dirty water and have barely any toys or enrichment and live on an old dump and get diseases from feral cats and…)
Again, no zoo would get away with this.
The last episode then closed with some more animal rights propaganda. Just letting the hypocrite sanctuary people have their say. If they truly believed the animals’ lives are not worth living, they would put them all down. But they do not believe their own words. And zoo animals, in most cases, have much better lives than at these scamtuaries.
They say the wild is thriving and perfect, like they’re pretending the massive trade in tiger parts doesn’t exist. Pretending that the African lion hasn’t declined by 50% in 20 years. Pretending that the Asiatic lion isn’t on the brink of extinction, and almost every other big cat is in decline in the wild.
They say “a tiger can travel 800 miles in the wild” …in what? A day? A year? Its lifetime? 800 miles is 1287 km, that means the tiger has to run at over 53 km an hour straight (its max speed it can only do in short bursts) for 24 hours… yeah, not likely. More lies.
And for the record, a human “can travel” 192 miles in one day. It doesn’t mean we need that space.
The Elephant in the Living Room(reviewed by me here) is an animal rights documentary that lies about exotic pets and their owners in order to scare the public into supporting bans.
They lie about care. They lie about laws. They lie about security. They lie about incidents. And they lie about the “sanctuaries” the animals end up in.
In my long row of criticisms against exotic animal “sanctuaries”, is this criticism against TWAS, or “The Wild Animal Sanctuary” in Colorado.
The film in question presents TWAS as a vast, savannah-like paradise, where animals can roam free, like their natural habitat (though one can question how “natural” it is for a black bear to roam a vast, treeless plain).
What is conveniently not mentioned is that TWAS owns hundreds of large animals, and only a handful of these large savannah-like enclosures.
I do not know what the standard of care in itself is at TWAS, or the mortality rate of their animals. But this is no ground any honest person can stand on, and use to criticize zoos.
Because surely, if any zoo (or private “pet owner”) kept their tigers and lions in cages like those above, they would be roundly condemned by animal rights activists and organizations everywhere, as a “prison camp” for wildlife.
It is embarrassing.
Urgh… in the last episode of Tiger King season 2, they showed that 100-some cats that were confiscated from Jeff Lowe (and they should have been, he obviously doesn’t care about the animals), they moved to the beautiful, vast, lovely sanctuary of TWAS in Colorado.
This means it’s high time to repost this one.
They complained that the cats used to be in “tiny cages”… well that’s what TWAS is, it’s kennel life for tigers. They only use those large savannah-like enclosures temporarily, and show them for the PR. Never would you see them show the reality of where the majority of their hundreds of animals live, for the majority of the time.
“There is no place for these animals to go!” they (sanctuary owners in general) cry. Well, there would be, if you didn’t keep pushing to ban all private owners and small zoos.
As for BCR, they sure are focusing a lot on the drama of “who killed Don Lewis?” which is interesting and important, but I haven’t heard a peep of criticism against BCR in this season, and in season 1, only a single short segment where they let Joe speak on how dreadful Carole Baskin’s roadside zoo is, if I recall correctly.
Because it is exactly that, a roadside zoo.It is not a sanctuary. It is a zoo that accepts visitors for money and gives tours. It even lets people pet cats, when they’re sedated. (And these are the people who scream about “dRugGeD TigERs!”)
But since they do not breed, they can only get more animals by “stealing” (that is, getting the government to take from others and give to them) other people’s animals.
I have still never seen a single zoo, sanctuary, private owner, in modern day, that keeps its cats as poorly as Carole Baskin’s BCR. It is a mystery how that place is still open, and she has not been put in jail or had her animals taken away.
So in other news: Wild animal sanctuaries and animal rights activists lie.
