The New Tiger Queen
One of my favorite parts of writing a book is doing research. If I don’t watch myself, I will fall down one rabbit hole after another because I positively yearn for knowledge. Leading up to the release of Much Ado about Barbecue, I’m going to tell you about some of the interesting research I’ve done for this book—and it’s not all about barbecue.
In this case, a manuscript comment from SuperAgent Sarah had me thinking…what would someone do with a significant amount of raw meat? Could you really donate it to a wild animal sanctuary? As it turns out, the answer is both yes and no. Best I can tell, animal sanctuaries prefer frozen meat that has not been thawed.
Now, I didn’t watch The Tiger King. One, I’m a contrarian and naturally skeptical of things that everyone seems to be doing. Two, I figured there were some scenes that might include animal cruelty or that there was animal cruelty going on behind the scenes. (And there was. You can read more about it here, but don’t go if you’re tenderhearted.)
First, I looked for some kind of sanctuary in Tennessee, since that’s where my story is located, but eventually I stumbled across Crown Ridge Tiger Sanctuary in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. Its mission stated that it was GFAS Verified, i.e. that the Global Foundation for Animal Sanctuaries checked it out and deemed it okay. So I decided to learn more from them.
In the process, I adopted a tiger! That makes me the Tiger Queen, right? Right? No? Oh, fine. A Tiger Countess or something, then.
Here are a few of the goodies I got for adopting Izzy: Info, postcard, and bookmark.
That is to say I made a small donation to “adopt” a tiger. I chose Izzy because he roars when he wants more attention, and I thought, “Same, Izzy. Same.” You can visit with the cats they have at Crown Ridge Sanctuary here. If you want to contribute, I’m sure they’d love to have you because it costs $30/day to feed just one tiger. That’s…about $11,000/year to feed just one tiger. (Where I got these stats)
Too bad the fictional tigers in the fictional animal sanctuary couldn’t use the fictional meat from the fictional book scenario I had been researching. Oh well. At least I learned something new and got to adopt a tiger! Also? Roar!
Did I mention that Much Ado about Barbecue will be out September 2nd?