05/24/2026
🥺🙏🏻🥺https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18yAa36oQ5/
I WASN’T LOOKING FOR SHELTER.
I WAS LOOKING FOR WHAT WAS LEFT OF MY HOME.**
You may see me standing beneath one last tree and think the image is dramatic because I am rare.
But that is not the first truth.
The first truth is that this land was not empty before the machines came.
It held shade.
It held cover.
It held deer trails, palmetto thickets, quiet places to rest, and the soft invisible paths I used to move without being seen.
I am a Florida panther.
I do not need much from you in the way people measure kindness.
I do not need to be touched.
I do not need to be fed.
I do not need to be turned into a symbol and forgotten by morning.
I need space that stays wild long enough for a life to fit inside it.
When forest is stripped to stumps and dust, I do not lose “scenery.”
I lose hunting ground.
I lose shelter from heat.
I lose safe routes for my young.
I lose the cover that keeps me away from roads, fences, headlights, and the slow violence of being pushed into smaller and smaller pieces of a broken map.
And then people say I came too close.
But I was never trying to enter your world.
You were watching my world disappear around me.
If we want panthers to survive, we cannot love them only in photographs.
We have to protect the last connected wild lands, defend wildlife corridors, and stop treating every untouched place as land waiting for a price.
Because I was not looking for shelter.
I was looking for the home that had been standing here before everything else was taken away.