UPDATE: Catskill Game Farm
You may recall the good news/bad news situation regarding Catskill Game Farm. The good news: it’s owner, Kathie Schulz, decided to close it. The bad news: she was so attached to the animals she cared (?) for that she was going to auction them off. She was going to keep the land, as her father worked hard for it and it was beautiful and she didn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.
Well, the auction was held, and as Jeremiah Horrigan wrote in After 73 years, Catskill Game Farm’s animals going separate ways, the owners "blamed increasing government regulation for their decision" to close the "sanctuary."
- Increasing government regulation was not the reason Schulz originally gave. (She said that lower turnout due to changing tastes, as well as the weather were the reasons.)
- As the attached research shows, Catskill Game Farm was hardly a sanctuary for its animals.
Schulz has received such bad press, and animal people have been so concerned about the fate of the animals being auctioned, that rescuers attended the auction and bid on animals to prevent them from being relocated for further abuse or neglect. One of the rescuers said to the reporter: "You hate doing business with these people, until you see the alternative."
Kudos from Mary Martin, Ph.D., Animal Person, to all the rescuers who attended the auction and tried to prevent further suffering and exploitation. It’s such important, difficult work. I have tremendous respect for people whose conscience compels them to spend their time, energy, and money putting themselves in positions where they themselves will suffer because of what they see and what they do.
Now all we have to do is stop people, like 13-year old Tiffani Koschitzki and her father Garry, who won her an African spurred tortoise for his bid of $1,000, from starting another petting zoo. But as of the writing of Horrigan’s article, that’s exactly what they planned to do.
The cycle continues . . .
