bigcatawareness I'm tagging you in a post re that ask because tumble simply WILL NOT all the reblog to post They are, for all intents and purposes, not technically a zoo. None of their animals are bought or bred, they're all taken from terrible conditions. I'd give you more information about the animals' previous conditions but I'm retyping this FOR THE THIRD TIME at 1 am so yeah. They wanted to open up and allow people to see the animals and hear their stories (as well as get some money rolling, as they aren't government funded). And the mayor of Lacey township at the time was basically like 'okay but if you want to do they then you have to call yourself a zoo'. Some of the animals appear ill because they're rescued, and many come in with illnesses and injuries. Theres nowhere that they can put these animals that the public wouldn't see unless they were to just take them home because they're a pretty small facility. But I can assure you they are being rehabilitated and given the best care possible. There's a vet on the premises every day. And most of the animals live to their full life expectancy. They truly care about their animals, hell they even gave their camel, Princess, a funeral service when she passed. I won't say that it's a perfect place, because I agree the enclosures could be bigger but they also never intended to get SO many animals, and people STILL continue to drop more animals on them (many of which they work on finding a different home for because they just don't have the facilities to care for all the animals theyre given). Also the original asker made a comment about the presence of Canadian geese. Now I'm not sure if they're a Jersey native, but I'm willing to bet by that that they aren't. There is literally no escaping the geese. Schools have even gone so far as to put dog statues in their fields to ttry and get the geese to stop (it didn't work) and the local college hired a second janitorial crew specifically to chase geese away and clean up the goose shit. Popcorn Park has taken measures to keep the geese out, and many enclosures have a top fence (fencfence roof?) To keep the little bastards out. Even Cape May zoo, a much larger and more equipped zoo has the same goose problem. I vaulenteered there for 5 years and got 2 of my dogs from there. I spent every saturday there as a child from the time i came to america until i was old enough to actually help out. I can assure you they aren't some evil animal abusing place

so i keep seeing articles/posts that claim some big cats who injured humans weren’t “completely domesticated yet” or stuff like that, and it really pisses me off. see, you CANNOT domesticate one single, individual animal. you can’t. domestication is the separation of a group/part of a species (of animals) from that species - bc you can’t take the whole population - and having them breed only within that group, over several generations (there’s more to it, so if you’re interested search for “domestication + definition” or sth). for example, the domestication of the dog started more that 10000 years ago, and that (along with cats) is a huge exception, bc normally, herbivores are much easier to domesticate (there are some other traits that make a species suitable for domestication, and most species don’t meet these, at all). so taking a lion, tiger or some other predator as a baby, raising them by hand and then expecting them to act like a pet because they have been ‘tamed’ (NOT DOMESTICATED, i’ll say it again) is so so so very dangerous for both you and the animal; it’s a gross misunderstanding of the animal’s needs (wild animals are pretty different from domesticated ones in many aspects), and dangers the direct contact with them causes, because that individual animal is STILL a wild animal (which is just used to seeing humans, and to some extent living with them), and its instincts could kick in any time. it is also completely unpredictable when brought in direct contact with humans! and before you go and say “but tigers/lions/whatever have been brought up in captivity by humans for decades now“ - humans have also tried to domesticate hippos, indian elephants, cheetas and zebras, etc., and that did NOT work out, so there’s a pretty big chance big cats cannot be domesticated at all....along with the fact that most big cat species are endangered, so the idea of making them into pets or keeping them as an attraction is in itself extremely questionable, imo..

I've just found what will probably become one of my favourite blogs ever. I love it when bigcatawareness corrects all the uneducated, gullible, silly tumblr people for fucking up their animals. "Posts photo of a leopard, calls it a tiger", you're not too bright. But now it's just on a whole other level. The Misidentified Animal Blog, reblogging all the idiots or people who don't know better. I embrace shit like this.