
Actor Mitchel Musso (left) poses with Rick Thomas and Chaos the tiger at the 2007 World Magic Awards held at the Barker hanger on October 13, 2007 in Santa Monica, California.
Tim Harrison, director of Outreach for Animals, which also rescues unwanted exotic pets, tells CNN: “I do not know of an owner, and I used to own big cats, that has not been attacked or scared by a mature big cat. If they tell you any different, they are lying. That living in fantasy land ultimately costs the owner and the cat their lives.”
He says, captive tigers, for example, become larger than their owners and are often forced to spend their adult lives in cages.
“The tiger doesn’t understand why he now is a prisoner when he used to sleep with you… Some owners surgically alter the cats which makes it hard to place at many sanctuaries because a declawed cat with rounded canines and not fed correctly cannot protect itself from other cats.”
A retired police officer, Harrison adds: “…it is always the police and fire [department] that have to handle these calls. There is no training academy that teaches them to handle this type of incident.”
Please take my cat!
A rescuer of bobcats, also known as wildcats, since she was 17 years old, Baskin of Big Cat Rescue started receiving calls asking her to take in tigers and lions by people who couldn’t handle them any more. Living on five acres of land in Florida, in 1992 she bought 67 more acres to try to meet the ever-growing demand.
In 2003, The Captive Wildlife Safety Act was passed, criminalizing the import, export, buying, selling, transporting, receiving and acquiring of certain big cats, with exemptions.
After the law was passed, Baskin found that the number of calls she was getting from people desperate to offload their exotic pets dropped from around 312 to approximately 160.
However, legal loopholes were soon discovered. “…it only applied to people who were buying them as pets. So anybody can get a USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) license, which is considered a commercial permit, for 40 bucks. Then your tiger is not a pet, it’s a commercial enterprise. That’s how people get around state bans.”
“We’re going to have to change the laws if we’re going to solve this problem,” Baskin says.
Dark figure of crime
There’s another serious problem other than profiteering from these animals — it’s suspected that some of the tigers may end up in the illegal wildlife trade for bones and parts, suggested to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
“[We] estimated there were conservatively around 200 of these cubs being bred and used each year. But there are no way near that many cubs ending up in need of rescue.”
“…We really believe that they are ending up in the illegal trade. The problem is, that’s just such a hard thing to prove. It’s a tight network of these bad guys that work together and they are so careful not to let it be known what they’re doing outside of their own industry.”
When Baskin has accompanied the authorities on big cat raids and taken in the animals, she has usually found them in deplorable conditions.
“The last raid that we did was in August last year and that was the first time we rescued a cat that was in a decent condition. We’ve been doing this for 22 years.”
‘Keeping big cats should be allowed’
The tiger she took in belonged to Timothy Gress, 52, from Augusta, Georgia, who was relocating the exotic animals of his sanctuary, Augusta Conservation Education, which he began about 22 years ago while working full time as an electrician. Home to a lynx, cougar, leopards, ligers (tiger and lion hybrid), several big lions, a gray wolf and a black bear, Gress needed to wind down the operation as it had become too big to handle.