This poor wolf was living at a facility in California that closed, surrendering its permits to the State of California, amid financial struggles. This left almost 500 animals seeking shelter. After thorough examination, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife chose to place Yukon at our sanctuary.

Yukon’s 2,500 mile road trip is underway – he will be arriving this week and have the opportunity to enjoy life at a true sanctuary for Christmas!

If you would like to donate to help care for Yukon and his friends, a generous donor has agreed to MATCH all donations to our general fund through December 31, 2019!

Thank you for your friendship and support! We will keep you posted on Yukon’s arrival and more as he settles in.

Five helicopters dropped water and three fixed-wing tankers dropped retardant on the flames until late last night.

Eventually, the evacuation orders for homes near the fire were lifted and although there are still 500 acres burning, the fire is 50% contained and no longer a threat to the sanctuary.

There will be smoke in the area for at least another day or two.

As long as things go the way they expect the sanctuary and animals will be fine.

Thank you to everyone for all of your concern.

The painful waiting game is finally over. After a tedious process of designing the building, followed by 8 1/2 months struggling through red tape to obtain the Marion County building permit, we are finally allowed to build!

We brought in fill, cleared trees, built up our driveway, moved our access gates and continued planning, but we couldn’t start construction until the permit was approved. The minute we were allowed, we couldn’t wait to break ground.

The construction has been underway for only 4 weeks and look how far along we are already!

Recent newspaper article includes a quote from Bob Barker himself!

We are so excited to start construction – everything has been waiting on this permit – but we had ‘stalled’ in our fundraising due to the uncertain timing of the project. Now the contractor is moving ahead quickly and we don’t want to stop construction while we raise money!

Will you join Mr Barker in supporting the sanctuary and help complete the project?

We need to keep the donations coming in as fast as our contractor can build! 

Donate Now

If you prefer, your tax-deductible gift can be mailed to:

Forest Animal Rescue
640 NE 170th Ct.
Silver Springs, FL 34488

From the beginning:

The Bob Barker Animal Care Building will ensure continuing high standards of veterinary and nutritional care for the animals at Forest Animal Rescue as the sanctuary continues to grow. With the improved capacity for care, the sanctuary will be able to accept even the tiniest, most fragile orphaned bear cubs for rehabilitation and release – while maintaining our high standards of care for the sanctuary’s 100+ nonreleasable rescued animals. It will also provide more working space for our interns, local and international volunteers as they learn proper methods of caring for wild animals in captivity.

In 2016, retired game show host, Bob Barker approved a $100,000 gift from his foundation to set the project in motion. We immediately began the design and planning process, but nothing seems to ever go smoothly the first time.

When we submitted our final design to the Marion County Building Department we discovered that we would need to revise our special use permit, requiring public zoning hearings and even more time. Revisions to the plans were repeatedly submitted, rejected, resubmitted…we were pulling our hair out…

Finally – Marion County hired Jeffrey Camden as the Building Department Director. Brand new on the job, we asked him to look at our project – The permit was approved that day!

This was the beginning of our black bear rehabilitation/release project – with an endangered Louisiana black bear. We named the little guy “Avonaco”, a Native American Cheyenne name meaning “lean bear.” He was a year old and only 15 pounds in January (he should have been 65-85 pounds)

After being with us for only two months, he has gained 48 pounds!

A second young Louisiana black bear was then found starving – crouched in a harvested sugar cane field, dehydrated and near death…he couldn’t even run away.

This one is almost 2 years old and weighed only 65 pounds. He should have been double that weight or more! He had wound up in an area with such poor habitat that his attempt to den for the winter failed. He simply had not gained enough weight to sustain himself.

We have named the new bear “Beau” – a goof Cajun name (since he is also from Louisiana) – and shortly after his arrival we introduced him to Avonaco. The are getting along fine and will both benefit from having a friend while they gain strength for release in may.

Although he is still thin, in less than two weeks he is already showing remarkable improvement!

Will you help us with the ongoing care of the bears in our rehabilitation program or to continue construction of our rehabilitation habitats as we prepare for orphaned cubs this summer?

Related articles:

Bear Freedom Project 2015

The orphan bear cub has a name!

 

When we left our old location in Zolfo Springs, we left behind 15 years of construction. Our tigers, Tony & Roy, had a 1-acre habitat to romp and play among the oak trees. We have promised them that  we would give them the same space at our new location and we are determined to do just that.

A generous grant from the International Fund for Animal Welfare, matched by gifts from our supporters helped us to get a very good start on the 1-acre expansion for the tigers. Unfortunately, the cost of building materials increased another $8,000 between the time we requested the grant and the time the materials were purchased.

We still have more to finish. Building a one-acre, 17′ tall habitat, using 20′ tall poles is no easy feat – it takes 6-8 people on ladders and equipment to hoist the heavy wire panels that high in the air. As a result, we can only work on the project when we have a good strong group of volunteers. It has made construction move a bit more slowly that we would like.

We are steadily increasing our volunteer base. Now we are only limited by funding.

This is what it looks like when it works smoothly….

When the staff, interns and volunteers from two sanctuaries team up, an amazing amount gets finished in a small amount of time. We recently had a fantastic group from Jungle Friends Primate Sanctuary in Gainesville, FL join us for a day of hard work. They have quite a lot of experience building with the very same materials that we use and the result of assembling that team was amazing!

We have much more to do – will you help?

The tigers need to have more space before we can begin allowing visitors fro guided tours twice a month. They deserve the right to move away from people and approach the visitors as they are comfortable doing so. In their current habitats, they are safe and secure – and comfortable with the people they know, but there is not enough room for them to move away to keep strangers a comfortable distance as they choose.

We want to keep our promise

Thank you for your ongoing support – we can’t wait to show you our new facility and how happy the animals are here!

The next day, we had 20 people show up to help out, both regular volunteers and lots of new ones! They worked in the heat of the day and right through a heavy rain storm, finishing up as the sky cleared. What a dedicated group.

The hard working gang included the most AMAZING group from Westbrook Service Corporation once again. They donated the materials and  brought trucks, a trencher, tools and a whole crew of professionals to help us! They have come through for us like this on multiple occasions, we really appreciate their dedication to the animals.

The Westbrook group trenched and ran power lines and water lines to all of the carnivores, running main lines from all the way at the far end of the 80 acres. We will now have electrical outlets and lights available along with hose bibs and places to connect our automatic waterers. As soon as we have full-time power we will be ready to go! (still on generators for now)

At the same time, we had five people from Animal Warriors join us again to work on habitat construction along with new volunteers who came on their own and our new intern. We are always so impressed by the generosity of our volunteers, giving of themselves when they have such busy lives.

At the end of the day everyone had been hot, rained on, chilled, hot again and wound up feeling really good about everything we accomplished. I”m sure everyone slept well last night. When you see the animals relaxing and thriving, enjoying their new homes it makes all the hard work so worthwhile.

If you are over 18 and would like to join us as a volunteer just send an email or call and we will make it happen!

The animals are all at the new location, safe and sound. We had 4 weeks to run back and forth to take down fencing and caging material before the new owners took possession. In the end, we wound up short of help and ran out of time….

It seems a shame that with as many fantastic volunteers as we had to help us prepare for the move and then to accomplish the move itself, too many people had family emergencies at one time. We ran out of time and the new owners were completely inflexible about allowing us an extension of time to get our things.

[pullquote align=”left|center|right” textalign=”left|center|right” width=”30%”]We lost $50,000 in caging and fencing, a huge amount of building materials, most of the animals’ toys and heaters, a storage shed, many of our yard tools, and an RV and a 34′ yacht that we were selling to help buy more materials.[/pullquote]

Two regular volunteers had deaths in their families, two others had family medical emergencies. To make it worse, the sanctuary’s co-founder, Kurt, suddenly had heart problems and wound up in the emergency room three times during the first three weeks. He was unable to make the drive to go down and collect materials, and he was the primary organizer for that effort. (he is much better now)

Now, instead of having the materials on hand to immediately expand the animal habitats to the acreage sized they have grown accustomed to, we need to purchase new materials and start over.

In addition to the caging and fencing we need to buy, we need to build their platforms and dens again, buy new toys and heaters and find a shed to store things in before everything is ruined by rain.

We can do this! We are already well into the construction and although we don’t receive funding from the government, we have learned that animal lovers stick together. We have faith in our new community and all of our supporters; we know this will work out like everything else has. 

For now, the animals are in secure but comparatively small habitats. These habitats are still larger than they had before they were rescued, but nothing near the acreage they had grown accustomed to at our old location.

It won’t be long and they will have the space they deserve. Once they are comfortable again, we will be able to rescue more animals and give guided tours of the sanctuary to our supporters, but the comfort of the animals in our care needs to come first.

There are many ways you can help us reach our goal:

– Donate an item from our wish list

– Make a monetary gift to help pay for special-order materials

– Volunteer your time (18 and older only)

– Help spread the word to others

If we all stick together, we can show the stingy new owners of our old property that we didn’t miss a beat. The animals will have their comfortable homes again with plenty of gifts from all of their friends.

Will you help us?

We didn’t realize it until after we had purchased the property, but apparently the sand pines need to go.

We have been advised by several biologists to take them out before we build. They have poor structural strength and will fall over onto our fencing and habitats, creating a potential threat to the animals in our care.

The task has been substantial, but we have managed to remove the dangerous trees from the areas where we are building. We have taken them out selectively, leaving unharmed as many of the other trees as possible.

The remaining trees include slash pines, loblolly pines, several varieties of oaks, maples, hickory and other hardwoods, as well as magnolia, holly and more. We have never seen such a beautiful variety of native trees and plants on one property.

[pullquote align=”left|center|right” textalign=”left|center|right” width=”30%”]One biologist said “The only thing holding up a sand pine is the sand pine next to it” – We’re beginning to believe him![/pullquote]