Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, is collecting real Christmas trees for its lions and tigers. “This time of year is really fun because Christmas trees are great enrichment for the big cats,” Laurie Vanderwal, a zoologist and co-curator at Turpentine Creek said. “They do like the smell of cedar and fir trees. It’s also something different and novel that they don’t get all the time.”Vanderwal said the refuge receives trees from locals and tree farms. They take trees with the decorations removed.Turpentine Creek has 123 animals, from big cats to grizzly bears, and even a hyena. Some of their animals are from the park in the popular show “Tiger King.””It was just such a relief because we knew those animals had not been getting proper care for many years,” Vanderwal said. The animals at the sanctuary were neglected by their past owners. She said caring for the animals goes beyond providing food and water. These animals cannot return to the wild because they were born and bred in captivity.”They don’t know how to hunt. They wouldn’t know how to survive,” Vanderwal said. “Because they’re coming from captive situations and abusive situations and neglect, they tend to come with veterinary issues.” Vanderwal said she’s in a profession she hopes doesn’t have to exist in the future. “Hopefully, that, you know, eventually people will not own these cats as pets anymore,” Vanderwal said. “People will not try to keep them in horrific conditions anymore. And the rescue part will not have to exist.”Vanderwal said they provide scent enrichment year-round. In spring and summer, they grow a garden of various spices like catnip, basil and oregano for the animals. Eureka Springs is located in the Ozark Mountains in Northwest Arkansas.
Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, is collecting real Christmas trees for its lions and tigers.
“This time of year is really fun because Christmas trees are great enrichment for the big cats,” Laurie Vanderwal, a zoologist and co-curator at Turpentine Creek said. “They do like the smell of cedar and fir trees. It’s also something different and novel that they don’t get all the time.”
Vanderwal said the refuge receives trees from locals and tree farms. They take trees with the decorations removed.
Turpentine Creek has 123 animals, from big cats to grizzly bears, and even a hyena. Some of their animals are from the park in the popular show “Tiger King.”
“It was just such a relief because we knew those animals had not been getting proper care for many years,” Vanderwal said.
The animals at the sanctuary were neglected by their past owners. She said caring for the animals goes beyond providing food and water. These animals cannot return to the wild because they were born and bred in captivity.
“They don’t know how to hunt. They wouldn’t know how to survive,” Vanderwal said. “Because they’re coming from captive situations and abusive situations and neglect, they tend to come with veterinary issues.”
Vanderwal said she’s in a profession she hopes doesn’t have to exist in the future.
“Hopefully, that, you know, eventually people will not own these cats as pets anymore,” Vanderwal said. “People will not try to keep them in horrific conditions anymore. And the rescue part will not have to exist.”
Vanderwal said they provide scent enrichment year-round. In spring and summer, they grow a garden of various spices like catnip, basil and oregano for the animals.
Eureka Springs is located in the Ozark Mountains in Northwest Arkansas.
And, lo, before the flood, the Lord said to Noah, “make yourself an ark… bring out every kind of living creature.” That was the Old Testament. But what happens today when disaster threatens animals? A powerful force—a zoo, a foreign government, even the U.S. Department of Justice—often calls from on high and enlists the services of one man: Pat Craig, founder of The Wild Animal Sanctuary in Colorado… who’s emerged as the go-to guy for orchestrating high-stakes rescues around the world. Last spring, we accompanied this modern-day Noah to a zoo in Puerto Rico, for his most ambitious mission yet.
These lions were once—literally—the pride of Puerto Rico. Housed at the Dr. Juan A. Rivero Zoo in the coastal town of Mayaguez, the only zoo on the island. But after years of decline, mismanagement and neglect… this was the tableau that greeted Pat Craig and his wife Monica when they arrived here from Colorado.
Jon Wertheim: What was your impression when you got to the zoo for the first time?
Monica Craig: The animals were very, very sad-looking and, some of them were very, very sick. I felt physically and emotionally overwhelmed.
Pat Craig: And even while we were there, animals died almost on a weekly basis.
Monica Craig: Correct.
Pat Craig: So that felt even worse, because we’re present, and yet we were there too late.
Pat and Monica Craig
60 Minutes
Over the course of a decade, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cited the zoo two dozen times for substandard conditions and animal mistreatment.
After hurricanes Irma and Maria ravaged the island, the zoo closed to the public in 2018. For the more than 300 winged…scaled…and four-legged residents still captive, the situation turned from bad, to downright desperate.
Monica Craig: We saw a zebra that had a horrible wound on her leg and her tail and she couldn’t stand up. We saw a pig that had a skin condition, her skin was just falling apart.
A mountain lion’s untreated cancer had been allowed to spread all over its body.
Monica Craig: Seeing the mountain lion suffering the way that he was, that broke my heart. And not being able to– sorry (crying).
Pat Craig: Yeah, help him. Yeah. It was just so evident that this facility was way beyond repair.
The U.S. Department of Justice—which enforces federal animal welfare laws in the states and Puerto Rico—agreed… and in February, staged an extraordinary intervention, sending a battalion of agents to the zoo…to evacuate every single species to permanent homes on the mainland.
To lead this mission—to captain this ark, as it were—the DOJ tapped Wild Animal Sanctuary founder Pat Craig.
We were there in April to witness the operation: equal parts military-style logistics and battlefield extraction. Among the targets: seven lions sweltering in a concrete bunker.
Wild Animal Sanctuary founder Pat Craig
60 Minutes
Pat Craig: And they never hooked up the power after the hurricane. They never hooked up the power to the zoo.
Monica Craig: Never.
Jon Wertheim: Wait, wait, wait, there’s a zoo that’s functioning with animals therE, and there’s no power?
Monica Craig: No electricity.
Pat Craig: No power. And then if you look at the pictures from the inside of their building, you know, it’s old steel bars just like jail cells, all in a row.
When it came time to coax the cats out of their cages, Craig entered the lion’s den.
Jon Wertheim: I gather the lions weren’t necessarily happy to see you and go with you. What happened?
Pat Craig: They’re definitely defensive, because they don’t know who we are, and what we’re doing and why. And so, we show up and we’re like, “Believe me, you’ve got to trust me, we’re trying to help you here.”
The sweet-talking didn’t work, so they deployed plan b: sedation… hard to watch, but accepted practice when rescuing uncooperative carnivores.
Over the course of five months, Craig and his team of 20 used patience…prodding… pursuit… and…grape jelly… to lure each animal into its custom-built crate. A camel… a kangaroo… a rhinoceros…. these stubborn hippos.
Monica Craig, a native Spanish speaker, had hoped to coordinate with the local staff… but the team from Colorado mostly had to go it alone… she says, the zookeepers in Puerto Rico often refused to help.
Monica Craig: We tried many, many days to communicate with them and trying to tell them, “Hey, we’re not bad people, were just trying to do what we’re supposed to be doing for these animals and give them a better home.”
Monica Craig and her husband, Pat Craig, removed animals from a Puerto Rico zoo after it was shuttered.
60 Minutes
Jon Wertheim: What was their response to that?
Monica Craig: They were upset. They were like, “No, I don’t think– I don’t think that’s right. The animals belong here.”
It was a sentiment shared by many in the community, and at times resistance curdled into outright sabotage.
The rescue team had nearly wrangled Mundi, once a star attraction, into her transport crate, when suddenly…
Pat Craig: Out of nowhere, this elephant– just flies up, tears out of there, starts runnin’ around.
Jon Wertheim: What do you think happened?
Pat Craig: Well, I think somebody shot her with a BB gun, if you ask me.
Jon Wertheim: And hit her in the rear end?
Pat Craig: Hit her in the rear end, just to make her hate that crate.
Monica Craig: Yeah.
Pat Craig: Now she thinks that crate did something to her.
We reached out to Puerto Rico’s Department of Natural and Environmental Resources, which is responsible for the zoo. In a statement, it said the animals were provided with comprehensive care, and denied there was any neglect… blaming problems at the zoo on hurricane damage, limited resources and aging animals.
Once the transport was finally ready: a police escort to the airport. Then the animals were loaded, one by one, onto charter flights bound for new homes Craig had arranged at sanctuaries across the U.S.
Mundi the elephant
60 Minutes
How do you ferry to safety an 8,000-pound elephant like Mundi? On a 747 cargo jet of course.
Departure brought a sigh of relief.
Monica Craig: When she took off, I cried because I said, “Thank you God, she’s in, it’s over, and she’s out of here. There’s no question about it anymore.”
Pat and Monica Craig took as many of the rescues as they could back to their 1,200-acre facility. A vast menagerie roams the grassy enclosures on the high planes of eastern Colorado.
Each of the 700-plus animals here came with a sad backstory… wagging their own tales of woe, as it were. Tigers kept in garages as pets. Lions saved from a zoo in war-torn Ukraine. Bears abused at a Korean medical facility.
Now 64, Craig got the idea for the place as a teenager in the 1970s, when a friend who worked at a zoo gave him a tour behind the scenes.
Pat Craig: There were all these animals, lions, and tigers that were in small cages. And he said, “These will be euthanized.” And I thought, “Wow, this is crazy, you know? These are healthy and not– they’re not old. They’re not sick.”
Craig decided right then and there to open his own sanctuary on his parents’ small Colorado farm. With few regulations to guide him, he built the animal enclosures himself and scoured biology books for pointers.
Jon Wertheim: Did you have any experience with lions and tigers?
Pat Craig: No, no, none.
Jon Wertheim: You have a degree in zoology?
Pat Craig: No. I was just starting college back then. It was going to be a business degree. (laugh)
And he quickly learned that lions and tigers are no house cats.
Pat Craig: In the early years, I was in the hospital more times than you could count. It was like, “OK, don’t do that again.” And, you know, so all those years of making mistakes and not getting killed.
Jon Wertheim: What specifically does a mistake look like?
Pat Craig: Uh, pretty bad. I’ve had my left arm almost completely torn off. I’ve had– bit through the chest and collapsed lungs.
Jon Wertheim and Pat Craig
60 Minutes
The animals, Craig can handle. But on his missions to hostile environments around the world, it’s the people he often needs extra help managing.
Heavily-armed federal marshals accompanied Craig when the Department of Justice dispatched him to retrieve maltreated big cats that had been kept by the notorious Tiger King Joe Exotic—the unlikely Netflix sensation—and his associates. These two are among the 141 animals Craig liberated and brought back here.
Jon Wertheim: What kind of conditions was Joe Exotic keeping these guys in in Oklahoma?
Pat Craig: Well, you know, it was just all these really small cages that were just lion after lion because it was a gigantic breeding operation primarily.
The rescue missions and the sanctuary operate on an annual budget of $34 million, funding comes mostly from private donations.
When animals arrive here, this is oftentheir first stop… designed to minimize shock by mimicking the conditions they came from. Here, they’re evaluated and given a treatment plan. Whether it’s medication or emergency surgery. Craig and staff veterinarian, Dr. Mikaela Vetters introduced us to Chad and Malawi… both rescued from Puerto Rico.
Jon Wertheim: How confident do we feel about our locks here?
Dr. Mikaela Vetters: Confident.
Jon Wertheim: This guy wants to get out.
Pat Craig: She says, “Yeah.”
Jon Wertheim: This guy’s ready to hang out with us.
They suffer from permanent neurological damage, likely caused by malnutrition, something Craig could spot just by looking.
Pat Craig: You see how she keeps doing that? She just doesn’t have control over it.
Jon Wertheim: Head tilting at an angle.
Pat Craig: Yeah, we’ve had literally hundreds of lions that have come through that have had that kind of problem.
Jon Wertheim: You’ve seen this before?
Pat Craig: Oh yeah.
The sanctuary devises a special diet for each animal… which requires 100,000 pounds of food per week— mainly donated by nearby Walmarts… occasional cupcakes included.
When we met him, Mikey the bear, another asylum-seeker from Puerto Rico, was midway through his rehab.
Dr. Mikaela Vetters: Right now he’s in his lock-out just so we can medically manage him.
Jon Wertheim: What did you see the first time you saw him?
Dr. Mikaela Vetters: He was in a great deal of pain very gingerly moving. We assume he’s got, you know, a great deal of arthritis which we’ve provided medications for and now he’s getting around like– almost like a young bear.
Nursing animals like Mikey back to physical health is one thing. Ministering to their emotional wounds is often a bigger challenge. Having been raised in captivity, many of the animals arrive with what amounts to severe PTSD, and they must be taught to trust the humans caring for them.
Pat Craig: They’re already mad at people anyway because of whatever people had done. I had one tiger years ago that any time you came near he’d want to hit the fence and kill you.
Jon Wertheim: What’s the timetable for trying to ease some of the trauma these animals have been through?
Pat Craig: You know, some were beaten, some were starved, some were mentally tormented, to a degree, you know. And so every case is different. So some of them will do it in a matter of days, some will be a few weeks.
Jon Wertheim: Doesn’t that story imply however traumatic this may have been, it’s not irreversible.
Pat Craig: It’s not irreversible.
The goal of all this rehab is to get these wild animals to act the part.
Remember Mundi? At the zoo she had zero contact with other elephants for more than30 years. We accompanied Craig on a visit to a refuge in Georgia, where he placed Mundi under the care of conservationist Carol Buckley. This marked the first time Craig and the elephant had seen each other since Puerto Rico.
Jon Wertheim: What do you notice?
Pat Craig: Well, first thing she just looks so much healthier. And just her demeanor is so much calmer and nicer. Every day when I would go see her in the zoo, I just, God, I would just hurt. And then now to see this is just amazing. Just truly amazing.
Buckley provides the care and feeding, but happily admits Mundi’s real mentors are the other elephants here.
Jon Wertheim: You’re just the innkeeper.
Carol Buckley: That’s right. Hey, I just open and close doors and make sure the waters are running, you know? And, the other elephant knows what they need to learn. And they’re instructing them. It’s fantastic. It is exactly the same as what happens in the wild.
That’s the same principle Craig employs at his sanctuary, and after two months of rehab, the lions from Puerto Rico were ready to enter their permanent habitat.
A lion being released into its permanent habitat
60 Minutes
We were on hand for the release. No one quite knew what to expect. Not least, the lions.
The first was reticent. But one by one….they started to venture out… enclosed for their safety, and ours… but otherwise, in a vast ocean of green.
Jon Wertheim: These guys have been in captivity their whole lives. This is a first.
Pat Craig: Yeah, this’ll be the first time ever that they’ve been able to either run, or live in a big space like this, even have deep grass.
Jon Wertheim: Makes you feel good?
Pat Craig: Yeah, absolutely. This is why we do this.
There were a few scuffles…but for Pat Craig, that’s exactly what he’d hoped for: lions acting like, well, lions. The animals come to this sanctuary from all over the world. But in this unlikely setting—here, silhouetted by the Rockies in eastern Colorado—they find more than just sanctuary… they, finally, find a home.
Produced by David M. Levine. Associate producer, Elizabeth Germino. Edited by Joe Schanzer.
Big Cat Rescue announced its closure in a statement written by Baskin’s husband, Howard Baskin, last week.
The sanctuary, which has housed injured or orphaned native wild cats for 30 years, said it will move most of its wildlife population from Tampa, Fla., to the Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas.
Howard wrote that Big Cat Rescue will continue to fund the care of their animals at Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge until the end of their lives.
Once the sanctuary’s wild cat population is transported to Arkansas, Howard claimed they will sell the Big Cat Rescue property and use the funds to support “species-saving projects.”
Story continues below advertisement
Alongside a desire to direct funds and attention to saving big cats in the wild, the statement noted it had become too costly to care for their “increasingly geriatric” population of 41 cats. Even with a smaller “skeleton staff” operating Big Cat Rescue since the COVID-19 pandemic, the overhead cost to operate the sanctuary runs apparently US$1.5 million per year.
“These are expenses like grounds maintenance, building maintenance, electricity for all the buildings and wells and tiger pool pumps, phones, insurances, technology updates, and equipment maintenance, to name a few,” the statement reads.
When Big Cat Rescue had 100 cats, the annual overhead cost equated to about $15,000 per animal. Now with only 41 cats, it reportedly costs the business $36,000 per cat each year.
The statement claimed the passage of last year’s federal Big Cat Public Safety Act in the U.S. — which Big Cat Rescue staunchly supported — will reduce the need for wild cat rescues. The act made it illegal to privately own big cat breeds including lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, jaguars, cougars or any hybrid of such species. The act also prohibited cub petting, which sees businesses breed baby animals to be used as photo props by paying customers.
Howard wrote in the statement that the goal of Big Cat Rescue has always been “to ‘put ourselves out of business,’ meaning that there would be no big cats in need of rescue and no need for the sanctuary to exist.”
The sanctuary could not in good conscience, however, stay in operation until its population dwindled to zero, as the Baskins feel their funds and resources could be better allocated to saving wild populations from extinction.
“The win-win solution both for our captive cats and the cats in the wild is for us to merge our cat population with the population at another existing accredited sanctuary and devote the remaining resources of our sanctuary to the ‘in situ’ projects being conducted around the world to avoid extinction,” the statement reads.
Howard wrote that a current expansion project at Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge is expected to be completed in six months and will provide adequate space to house Big Cat Rescue’s animals.
Baskin and Big Cat Rescue catapulted into the public eye three years ago as part of Netflix’s Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.
The documentary followed Joseph Maldonado-Passage, also known as “Joe Exotic,” a former Oklahoma zookeeper. He was convicted of trying to hire someone to kill Baskin, who had tried to shut him down, accusing the Oklahoma zoo of abusing animals and selling big cat cubs.
Story continues below advertisement
In retaliation, Maldonado-Passage raised questions about the disappearance of Baskin’s husband Don Lewis, who vanished mysteriously more than two decades ago. The documentary extensively covered Maldonado-Passage’s repeated accusations that Baskin killed her husband and possibly fed him to her tigers. Baskin, who founded Big Cat Rescue, has never been charged with any crime and released a statement refuting the accusations made in the series.
Maldonado-Passage was resentenced in 2022 to serve 21 years in prison after he begged the court for leniency as he began treatment for prostate cancer.
‘Tiger King’ star Joe Exotic re-sentenced to 21 years in federal prison
Pamela Anderson’s life story has been a subject of much scrutiny and often used without her permission for sensational stories and other people’s profit. This doc made with Netflix is from her perspective, exploring her career from Playboy model to today, her relationship with Tommy Lee, the infamous sex tape, and her reaction to Hulu’s Pam and Tommy. It includes intimate interviews and appearances from her kids, and most importantly, Anderson’s permission.
ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) – The infamous reality TV star “Tiger King” Joe Exotic, whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, is now spending time in a cage at the Atlanta federal prison and he isn’t too happy about it.
In posts to social media, Joe says that senators (Jon) Ossoff and (Raphael) Warnock and (Herschel) Walker are “all lying to you Black Voters of #Georgia because the Animals at the Atlanta #Zoo are living better than your loved ones are in here… .” He also describes the prison as “the bottom of hell.”
In July, Sen. Ossoff opened hearings into alleged abuses and corruption at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta.
Ossoff, who is chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, told the panel that a 10-month bipartisan probe uncovered a “harrowing picture of a federal prison in crisis for many years.”
“Conditions for inmates were abusive and inhumane, and should concern all of us who believe in our country’s constitutional traditions, that all people have an Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment and a Sixth Amendment right to counsel,” said Ossoff.
After the hearings, federal officials nearly emptied the prison and banned several prison staffers.
Ossoff recently inspected the prison and said that conditions at the prison appear to be improving. He also said it was too soon to declare the prison to be problem-free.
The former 59-year-old zookeeper was sentenced to 22 years in prison in January 2020 after he was convicted to trying to hire two men to kill animal welfare activist and enemy Carole Baskin.
He was also convicted of killing 5 tigers, selling tiger clubs and falsifying wildlife records.
It is unknown why Maldonado-Passage is in the Atlanta prison or how long he will be there. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer after he was sentenced but is reportedly in remission. Recent media reports say he has been battling a common variable immunodeficiency and has been sick for the last few months. He was previously imprisoned at the Butner Federal Medical Center in North Carolina, which houses inmates with special needs.
Atlanta News First received the following statement from the Bureau of Prisons:
The BOP takes pride in protecting and securing individuals entrusted in our custody, as well as maintaining the safety of correctional staff and the community. We make every effort to ensure the physical safety of inmates confined to our facilities through a controlled environment that is secure and humane.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gray/MUGTMJPXVNCFHF7LA6TU6WHRYI.jpg)