This week Advocacy for Animals presents a first-person account by Carole Baskin, the founder and CEO of Big Cat Rescue, a Florida sanctuary for more than 100 unwanted and rescued lions, tigers, cougars, and other big cats. We think you will find her story compelling.

I never set out to start a sanctuary. It happened partly by accident, then largely through a process of evolution.

In 1992 my late husband and I were at an exotic animal auction buying llamas when a man walked in with a terrified six-month-old bobcat on a leash. He said she had been his wife’s pet and that she didn’t want her any more. We brought her home and called her Windsong. I adored her and she generally responded in the ways we expect a pet to do. But one of the traits that makes exotic cats bad pets is the tendency to bond to one person and be jealous of or aggressive toward others. She wouldn’t tolerate my husband, so he decided to buy and hand-raise one or more bobcat kittens of his own. […]

» Read more of Big Cat Rescue

This week Advocacy for Animals presents an introduction to humane education by Zoe Weil that originally appeared as a chapter in the book Living a Life of Value: A Unique Anthology of Essays on Value & Ethics by Contemporary Writers (2006), edited by Jason A. Merchey. Zoe Weil is the cofounder and president of the Institute for Humane Education (IHE). IHE trains individuals to be effective humane educators and offers the only Master of Education degree in humane education, through an affiliation with Cambridge College, in the U.S. IHE also offers humane education weekend workshops throughout the U.S. and Canada.

What if, by the time they had completed 8th grade, all children were aware of and concerned about the people who make their sneakers, T-shirts, and electronics in factories around the globe, and realized that their money and choices represented their vote for working conditions throughout the world? What if they understood the relationship between the food in their cafeteria, growing obesity rates and ill-health, water pollution and soil erosion, and the suffering of farmed animals, so that with their teachers and school administrators they were able to influence the food service to offer healthy, organic, humanely-produced meals? […]

» Read more of Every Life of Value: Humane Education for a Peaceful and Sustainable World

Consider the life of an elephant on the plains of Africa. She lives in a family group that may include her mother, sisters, and aunts and their children as well as other, unrelated females and pre-adolescent males. With this group she wanders for miles every day, browsing on a variety of plant material. She drinks at waterholes and rivers and bathes when she can. Through she is in proximity to many species of animals, some of them predators, she finds security in the company of many of her kind and is rarely threatened. […]

» Read more of The Case for Freeing Captive Elephants

Somewhere in North America, a meadow is silent, a forest without song. Here a pair of mockingbirds has disappeared; there habitat suitable for robins has been bladed. A meadow hospitable to vireos has been flooded; a desert river that acts as a beacon for meadowlarks, cedar waxwings, willow flycatchers, and hummingbirds has gone dry. […]

» Read more of The Silence of the Songbirds