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The trade ends where education begins. Help us open the doors.
Help Open the DoorsThe call comes, and we go. Nevada. California. Quebec. Ontario. Twenty-eight hundred miles for seven tigers from a private owner. Thirty-eight hundred miles for eight wild cats exploited by a roadside zoo. Fifty-eight hundred miles for six lions who had aged out of the photo line and were already scheduled to be put down.
Not one of them was born wild.
That is the moment everyone shares. The trailer opens, the animal steps onto grass, and for one day the story has a happy ending.
It does not. That is the day the real work starts.
Think about the last time you stood somewhere open. No wall in your sightline. Nothing between you and how far you could see.
You felt something. Most people do. A loosening in the chest that has no practical use and no name in ordinary conversation.
That is the wild in you. Its in all of us. You feel it in deep water, on an empty road at night, the first warm day after a long winter. It is the oldest part of a person. It is in our DNA.
David and Gwen Huck, along with their dog Mia
The Huck family made the lead gift that started this building. Liebchen’s Gift Foundation put a challenge behind it that brought a million dollars to the ground it stands on. Everything after that is the rest of us.
“The Education Center will introduce visitors to the needs these wild animals have and the loving care provided to them. The Center will inspire people to learn more, understand why these animals belong in the wild, and help end the Trade that threatens them.” ~David and Gwen Huck
Education is not something we added. It is one of the three commitments the Refuge was founded on, alongside preservation and compassion. Our educators teach school groups on the grounds and visit K-12 classrooms across our region. They answer the same questions from children every week. Where he came from. Why he cannot go back. What a person is supposed to do about it.
What we have never had is a proper climate-controlled space to educate in year-round.
The Huck Family Education Center changes that.
Here is how it starts. Someone pays twenty dollars to hold a cub for a photograph. The cub is worth money for about twelve weeks. By four months it is too strong to handle and too expensive to feed, and it moves on to a basement, a back lot, a roadside pen.
Then, if enough voices are raised when animal welfare laws are violated, someone calls us.
For thirty-four years we have watched the moment happen, one visitor at a time. Somebody walks up to a tiger, goes quiet, and leaves changed in a way they cannot explain at dinner. Nobody lectured them. The wild within them did the work.
They will not pay to hold one, ever. They will want it left alone. Out there, whole, without them. And they will raise someone who feels the same way, which is the only way to affect real change.
“After I saw behind the curtain how these amazing animals are abused for profit, I am teaching my kids and anyone else who will listen. Our cute photos are not worth their lifetime in a cage.”
—Tucker, visitor
We will not see the end of this ourselves. Somebody will.
Every child who walks through those doors is the reason we think so.
This is never going to end on its own.
The money to break ground is raised.
The money to open the building is not.
Gifts that name a space in the building start with a conversation.
Keira Haley, Director of Philanthropy
860-214-3093
Sandra Ames, Director of Legacy & Leadership Giving
479-372-3278
Your tax-deductible gift will support the Huck Family Education Center, made possible by Liebchen's Gift Foundation, or, when necessary, the area of greatest need. Gifts are made to Turpentine Creek Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) organization.
Nearly every animal here arrived because somebody paid for a moment with a captive wild animal. That market is the whole cycle, and it does not close by law alone.
It closes when enough people stop buying.
You do not have to give money to end this.
