CWI's The ReWild Fund 2023 Grants

February 28, 2024

CWI is pleased to announce our 2023 grant awards!

With funding provided by our members, we were able to provide support to Global Sanctuary For Elephants and WildCat Ridge Sanctuary.

GSE is home to elephants in Brazil with most of their residents having been subjected to circus life. They offer elephants a place to recover, find new friendships, and live their lives in as normal and natural a manner as possible. Founders Scott and Kat Blais have a combined 40 years of elephant experience and are true elephant experts who are willing to share their time and knowledge to help captive elephants worldwide.

They recently had the opportunity to have some much-needed supplies from the U.S. brought to Brazil, and we were glad to help with funding from The ReWild Fund in order to purchase important joint supplements and other forms of natural pain relief for the beautiful girls in their care. Elephants who have been subjected to circuses or other inappropriate forms of captivity frequently develop arthritis, foot and gait issues, and suffer from other ailments that require constant care.

Recovering from circus life, Bambi roams at Elephant Sanctuary Brazil.

Click here to learn more about GSFE.

With our The ReWild Fund, we aim to give back to those organizations directly or indirectly impacted by our work to free animals from abuse. We are keenly aware that our success creates a phenomenal (and expensive) amount of work for other organizations! This was especially true in 2023 as the wild cats and dolphins who had been kept captive at The Mirage Resort and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip were finally set for release after years of campaigning for their freedom.

The animals were not all owned by a single entity and there are no dolphin sanctuaries in the U.S., so elements of that release were complex, and, in some cases, not ideal. However, even those dolphins who were owned by SeaWorld and were returned to SeaWorld were better off than their previous life in an insufficient tank without appropriate shade in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Sadly, progress for animals is often imperfect.

We are happy to share, though, that six of the tigers formerly held at Mirage were placed at WildCat Ridge Sanctuary in Oregon! Free from the bright lights of Las Vegas, the three sets of siblings now enjoy a life that resembles, as closely as possible, a natural life for tigers. We are enormously grateful to WildCat Ridge for taking on the huge responsibility of keeping an additional six tigers safe, happy, and healthy, and we are also grateful to our supporters who enabled us to send them $1,500 to help care for those tigers.

As this funding season comes to a close, we aim to raise $10,000 to distribute to worthy projects in February 2025. To learn more about CWI's The ReWild Fund and donate to help animals, click here.