Tag archives: sanctuary

Relinquishing an exotic pet bird is rarely ideal, but an owner admitting they have run out of options to handle the full-time needs of a mature parrot is honest and very real. Most people are unprepared for the possessive commitment a parrot exhibits toward its owner or other beloved family member. When that commitment can’t […]

Impulse. Illogic. Emotionalism. These human qualities are the ones not to rely on when considering an exotic animal as a pet. Exotics may be beautiful, talented, and rare, but they are also living creatures – not commodities or toys. Too often they are kept captive at the whimsy and even cruelty of their owners, looking […]

Back in 2006, the year before horse slaughter in the U.S. ceased for good, the last three such stateside slaughterhouse facilities killed more than 100,000 horses for human consumption, shipping the meat overseas. Even with those facilities shuttered, approximately 75,000 American horses are still shipped to their deaths in foreign slaughterhouses every year, although the […]

The COVID crisis has been quite a challenge for nearly everyone in the world. But for Santa Barbara Bird Sanctuary – the nonprofit founded in 2004 by director Jamie McLeod to rescue and often rehabilitate unwanted and displaced companion parrots – the pandemic really has been for the birds. Or rather, not so much, as […]

In an effort to rethink traditional in-person fundraising efforts, Lotusland has announced a new benefit event, Sanctuary.  Earlier this year, 36 local artists were asked to create new work inspired by Lotusland. The artists were given three days to visit the Garden and only eight weeks to create, capture, and complete their muse at Lotusland. […]

The multi-faceted bi-racial Ashley Woods Hollister is an arts champion and curator, and supporter of the Santa Barbara nonprofit community. She’s served on the boards of Explore Ecology, on the Santa Barbara Mental Wellness Center since 2007, and just joined the board of the Foundation for Climate Change Action. She is the co-founder of T.W. […]

Whales Without Walls, which screened at the 2020 Santa Barbara International Film Festival this past winter, is essentially a five-minute argument for a modern real-life solution to the issues that were addressed in the fiction film Free Willy. The mission of the Whale Sanctuary Project is to establish a model seaside sanctuary where whales and […]

There was once a bunch of impossibly cute and endearingly musical primates swinging around a compound just outside the City of Santa Clarita. And then they moved to Santa Barbara County. That’s how, ideally, the story will go for the Gibbon Conservation Center, a unique research, breeding and residential facility dreamed up and established by […]