Howie Summarizes Cub Petting for Ad Campaign

CUB PETTING PROJECT

 

BACKGROUND

 

Growing public awareness of captive animal issues. In the last few years we have increasingly seen that public awareness of captive exotic animal issues has been growing at an accelerating rate. It has become widespread enough to impact businesses that exploit animals by reducing attendance to a point where they had to either close down like Ringling or change their ways dramatically like SeaWorld.

 

For more on this accelerating trend see an article I wrote for Encyclopedia Britannica at http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2018/10/how-is-the-struggle-for-womens-suffrage-100-years-ago-like-the-battle-to-stop-abuse-of-big-cats/ .

 

Cub petting drives the breeding. The vast majority of the breeding, particularly of tiger cubs, is to create a steady stream of cubs in order to charge the public to hold and pet them, take photos with them, even swim with them.  The cubs are only useful for a few months so a steady supply is needed.

 

This cub petting trade is a horribly abusive treatment of these animals because:

 

• Cubs are ripped from their mothers at birth to make them more manageable because if they are left with the mothers for even a month they become the equivalent of feral cats and not useful. This separation at birth is a torment to any mammal mother and offspring.

• The cubs are physically punished in order to diminish their natural tendencies to play roughly, which nature builds in as part of their training to be successful tigers in the wild.

• The cubs are deprived of the mother’s milk that has immune qualities that bottle formula cannot duplicate. The cubs’ immune systems are further impaired by sleep deprivation, because the cubs, who normally would sleep the largest part of the day, are kept awake as long as there are customers willing to pay. They are often awakened from sleep in order to be used for petting.

• These tiny cubs with weakened immune systems are then exposed to being handled by hundreds of people who may be carrying disease either themselves or from pets at home. Cubs with raging diarrhea and ringworm have continued to be used by the cub petting operations.

• There is no tracking of how many cubs die in the process. There is no tracking of how many that survive are raised until big enough to slaughter to supply the illegal trade in their parts because there is no tracking of what these few breeders do with the cubs once they are too big to pet. The ones that can be tracked end up with miserable lives with the females being unhealthily bred constantly instead of the natural 2-3 year cycle that occurs in nature because it takes that long for the mother to teach the cubs to hunt and for the cubs to reach sufficient maturity to be on their own.

 

There are about a half dozen significant cub petting breeders in the country. Some are in relatively small markets, at least one in the larger SE Florida market.  However, their customers come from all over the country, particularly if they are in vacation destination areas. The rest of the country’s zoos operate without cub petting.

 

Our goal is not to put any zoo out of business. Our goal would be to create such awareness of the misery caused by cub petting that people would

(a) Not patronize it and

(b) Call out those few zoos who do it to a point where the reduced revenue and negative publicity would cause the zoos to change their ways and join the vast majority of zoos who are successful without doing cub petting.

 

BCR Financial Position. We have had a series of good years that has allowed us to (1) fully fund the “pension liability” that insures we can care for the cats to the end of their lives if another 9-11 or other event caused donations and visitors to stop and (2) we have made most of the major capital improvements needed on the sanctuary property. The puts us in a position where, if we thought we could have a meaningful impact on public awareness of cub petting that would cause people not to patronize it we could spend as much as $1 million over the course of a year.

 

Digital marketing. I asked Liz that we consider all kinds of traditional media, not just digital, and expressed some reservations about digital based on our one experience. The cub petting video PPK produced and geo-fenced to the Capitol area was off the charts successful in terms of 70+% of people who viewed it watching it to the end, versus the norm of only a few percent. But, despite the geo-fencing, in our limited questioning of congressional aides, none had seen it. So it did not accomplish its primary purpose.

 

QUESTION FOR PPK

 

The question I discussed with Liz is whether with this kind of a budget we could have a meaningful impact, i.e. build awareness to a point where patronage dropped, and if so how. Below are the bullet points I took away from our half hour conversation taking notes as fast as I could while we talked, so they may not be accurate.

 

• Budget too small to have national impact.

• Newspaper is older demographic.

• Circus is a much more broadly known issue. If I understood correctly, Liz felt many people do not even know there is cub petting, so it may be harder to educate them. My subsequent thoughts: We do get a lot of calls at the sanctuary from people asking if we have cubs to pet. Even if people have not heard of it, it is a simple concept captured in two words pretty vividly. And in the case of the circus, this is a practice that was widely accepted by our society for over 100 years so the advocates had to reverse people’s thinking. Therefore I might argue that people having not heard of cub petting gives us the benefit of no preconceived bias to overcome. Also, “tiger selfies” have been pretty broadly in the news and social media, with Tinder instituting a policy against them, so I am not sure there is as much lack of awareness as Liz seemed to think, if I understood her correctly.

• Should strongly consider digital & social media (I am not sure if there is a difference unless digital is referring to having info on a website we send people to?).

• With our budget we could do enough to have impact in a smaller market like Myrtle Beach, SC by geo-fencing and filtering. If it worked in one market, we could over time replicate in others.

• Probably not use banner ads like we did in DC because it requires people seeing them 8-9 times before they click. Use more interruptive digital techniques that send people to a web page. Our current page is bigcatrescue.org/cubs. It is very thorough, but very long. So I am thinking we need a video at the top that concisely and compellingly covers it. Because people may not want to see any vivid mistreatment of cubs and we have limited undercover video to show, Carole came up with the idea that for this page and what we push on Facebook we might use animation to tell this story. She is experimenting with that.

• Not sure if I got this right, but I think she said that with Facebook ads we could set a filter for people who had done Google searches on terms like “tiger cub petting” or “cub petting.”  So could capture people in Myrtle Beach who had searched for cub petting before coming.  However, if people coming on vacation bought tickets in advance it would be too late. Subsequently it occurred to me that if our goal is to catch people who search on cub petting and get them to a website, we could we do that by pouring money into keywords so our website comes up when they search. But, when I do that search, the top results already are people like us opposing cub petting. Despite this, the cub petting operations still thrive.

• Liz talked about using Facebook to create material that people would want to repost, gaining exponentially more unpaid views and having people who “get it” influence others. So the alternative to Google ads based on the searches would be boosting these posts hoping to reach a lot of people and have them repost to others.

 

NOTE: in contrast to Carole, I have limited understanding of the Facebook marketing so some of my notes above my reflect that.

 

Hi, I’m Carole Baskin and I’ve been writing my story since I was able to write, but when the media goes to share it, they only choose the parts that fit their idea of what will generate views.  These are my views and opinions. If I'm going to share my story, it should be the whole story.  The titles are the dates things happened. If you have any interest in who I really am please start at the beginning of this playlist: http://savethecats.org/

 

I know there will be people who take things out of context and try to use them to validate their own misconception, but you have access to the whole story.  My hope is that others will recognize themselves in my words and have the strength to do what is right for themselves and our shared planet.  

 

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Music (if any) from Epidemic Sound (http://www.epidemicsound.com) This video is for entertainment purposes only and is my opinion.  Closing graphic with permission from https://youtu.be/F_AtgWMfwrk