On Wed 6/5 Northdown Cafe & Taproom hosts its second yearly Lions, Tigers & Beers benefit for a nonprofit no-kill big-cat rescue center in Sandstone, Minnesota, called the Wildcat Sanctuary. It provides spacious habitats for its animals—not just lions and tigers but also cougars, jaguars, lynxes, bobcats, caracals, servals, and more—but don’t get any ideas about visiting, because it’s not open to the public.
The sanctuary also aims to obviate many of its own reasons for existing with a No More Wild Pets campaign—and “wild pets” doesn’t just mean, say, a declawed white tiger languishing at the end of a chain in some rich asshole’s backyard in Las Vegas. Savannah cats and bengals, which are crosses between domestic felines and, respectively, servals and Asian leopard cats, are increasingly fashionable as pets (in large part because they’re more manageably sized), but they also tend to make everyone involved pretty miserable if you try to keep them inside—especially when there have been fewer domestic crosses in their bloodlines.