Talking Animals: Howard Baskin outlines major changes at Big Cat Rescue—All the cats are gone (to Arkansas), and the property is sold

Howard Baskin—often identified as Advisory Board Chairman of Big Cat Rescue, and spouse of Carole Baskin, the founder of the sanctuary that operated in Tampa for more than three decades—recalls, as a savvy businessman wielding a Harvard MBA, his reaction upon first  getting a close look at the details of Big Cat’s financial operation: He shouted “Yikes!”

Just kidding. He didn’t shout “Yikes!” But he was deeply concerned. The sanctuary was spending several times what it was earning, losing money for 11 years running. 

So, Baskin recounts, he and Carole sat down for a “kitchen table strategy” session, not unlike those he’d conducted for years as a management consultant, helping struggling small companies reconfigure key elements of their operations, to boost their financial health. 

One upshot of the Baskin/Baskin confab: offering tours of Big Cat Rescue, which generated income, and cultivated both an educational component and a politically-active one via a simple way that sanctuary visitors could contact their legislators.

He discusses the Big Cat Public Safety Act, a critical piece of legislation he and Carole (and many others) worked on tirelessly for years, with it passing in 2022—significantly altering the captive big cat landscape, notably halting the “cub petting” trade, a lucrative enterprise that requires a steady stream of new tiger cubs, and discarding the cats who age out of the gig. 

Baskin notes the population of cats at Big Cat Rescue had gradually diminished during this period, making it more feasible that they could achieve a long-held goal: the need for rescuing and caring for big cats would experience such a reduction, they could effectively put themselves “out of business.”

He explains that with this new scenario moving within reach, they rather quickly arrived at the answer of where to send the remaining cats: Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas, Howard citing such Turpentine Creek virtues as spanning 440 acres (vs Big Cat’s 60), providing space to build much bigger enclosures for the relocating Big Cat animals, the Arkansas facility was also run by a couple, and  they were amenable to the Baskin’s proposal.

Eventually, all the cats having been moved to Turpentine Creek, the Baskins sold the Big Cat Rescue property—for nearly $20 million–to two 

Developers, who plan to turn it into apartments and townhouses. 

But all this reinvention hardly means the Baskins have stopped caring for cats or engaging in cat rescue. Indeed, Howard outlined their global cat-oriented plans currently, and as they look ahead to the future. 

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