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Date Published: 22/08/2001
Author: Sonia Shah There are more pet tigers in America than wild tigers in the rest of the world. What on earth is going on? asks Sonia Shah. |
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Everyone knows that the tiger is one of the world’s endangered species. With the panda, whale and elephant, it’s one of the media’s favourite ‘struggling wildlife’ icons. Yet, bizarrely, while its numbers are slipping in its natural Asian habitats, a new kind of tiger is doing rather well over in America. The pet tiger.
According to the Zoological Society of London, between 5,000 and 7,000 tigers live in the wild around the world. Yet at least as many pace in cages owned by private American citizens, who own between 6,000 and 7,000 endangered tigers as pets, according to the US-based Animal Protection Institute.
While the 1973 US Endangered Species Act and the 1975 international Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna cracked down on the taking of endangered animals from the wild, neither act regulates what happens to the progeny of the endangered animals brought to the United States before their passage. Today, owning a captive-born endangered animal is legal in 31 US states. Breeding and selling these animals requires a few permits and licences, which even some endangered-cat owners say are too easy to obtain.
Much of the private trade in endangered tigers originated in ‘surplus’ tigers dumped by zoos. Zoos hungry for the outpouring of public attention paid to new zoo babies bred more tigers than they could keep, and ended up selling the surplus cubs to private breeders, who in turn sold the animals to auctioneers, hunting farms, and pet-owners. US-based trade magazines such as Animal Marketplace Magazine and Animal Finder’s Guide list exotic animal sales and auctions, along with ads from tiger breeders and pet owners, soliciting purchases ($3,500 for a pair of Bengal tigers), trades (12-week-old de-clawed Siberian tiger for a baby lynx or cougar), and ‘jungle-cat reduction sales’.
There are dozens of internet sites and even private associations such as the National Alternative Pet Association that promote private ownership of exotic and endangered species.
But why would a private American citizen want to own a huge, carnivorous Asian predator? ‘Something about their sleek bodies, graceful movements, self-assured independence, and raw power,’ wrote one big-cat owner, ‘attracts like no other animal.’ This intoxicating attraction is almost sexual: ‘you can almost feel the smooth ripple of rock hard muscles as the cat shifts slightly to put its massive head in your lap. The rumble as the cat begins to purr is so deep it is felt more than heard, and echoes through your body until your whole being resonates with its subdued power.’
Once they own an exotic animal, many eventually turn into self-made conservationists, incorporating their farms and ranches as non-profit nature centres. Although some may be managed well, others are clearly politically-correct cover for poorly executed exotic-pet-ownership. The Tigers Only Preserve in New Jersey traces its founding to 1976, when a former circus employee bought two Bengal tiger cubs from a big-cat trainer at a New Jersey theme park. She kept them in a barn next to her rented apartment. In 1987, Joan Byron-Marasek’s permit was denied because of the inadequacy of her facilities. Three of the tiger sub-species she wanted covered by the permit were already extinct, which gives a sense of her knowledge of the endangered tigers she professed to want to save.
But the next year her permit came through and by 1999, she had over two dozen tigers on her 12-acre compound in New Jersey, which is closed to the public. Over a decade of annual inspections had apparently found little amiss, yet in January 1999, one of her tigers escaped the compound and wandered the New Jersey suburbs for seven hours before being shot and killed by state officials.
The incident threw a rare light on the preserve, which few neighbours knew about. A curator from the Bronx Zoo who was brought in to inspect it called the preserve the ‘worst facility that I have ever seen,’ citing rotting deer carcasses, cramped facilities, rat infestations, and evidence of malnourishment among the tigers. While neighbours hustled together a lawsuit against her and state authorities attempted to shut her preserve down, Byron-Marasek went on breeding her tigers, and five more were born in April 1999. The state wildlife agency issued her permit to use the tigers for advertising and other theatrical purposes, but authorities found no evidence of either.
Aside from the canned-hunt ranches, where for a few thousand dollars, hunters can shoot an endangered cat at close range, Americans who own tigers – whether as livestock, pets, or rescued victims – all claim that they are saving this endangered species from extinction. ‘I like raising animals that are rare or endangered,’ says Animal Finder’s Guide founder Pat Hoctor. ‘Since there is less land each day available to animals due to man’s encroachment, I feel animals must exist in captivity or face extinction.’ Yet according to zoologists, most of the thousands of privately owned tigers in the United States, as well as close to 200 of all zoo tigers, are hybridised, ‘generic’ or ‘mutt’ tigers. Breeders introduced jungle-dwelling tigers to Siberian tigers, to produce these generic tigers that could never survive in the wild.
The scientific breeding program that accredited zoos around the world introduced to their tigers in the 1980s, while laudable, may not help save tigers either. These zoos have weeded out generic tigers and instead bred captive tigers to maintain sub-species lines. The idea is to create a ‘genetic reservoir’ that could be re-introduced into the wild or used to re-seed a new wild population.
Scientists have introduced other captive-born endangered animals into the wild, in expensive, time-consuming, and small-scale projects that have shown mixed results to date. But for
zoo tigers, this unlocking of the doors seems especially unlikely, zoo officials say. The wilderness to introduce them to shrinks daily. Regionally, the human poverty, maldevelopment, and pollution that threaten wild tigers show no signs of abating. Until the world solves these colossal, global problems, there’s little chance for any tigers in the wild, captive-born or not.
So why do American zoos keep tigers at all? Zoos claim that their tiger exhibits play a crucial educational role, alerting the 300 million people who visit the world’s zoos to the problems facing endangered species. Clearly, American zoo exhibits have inspired a deep love for these majestic creatures that normally live so very far away. The Tiger Information Center at the Minnesota Zoo receives volumes of mail from people who write, ‘I love tigers. How can I buy one?’
The desire to possess a creature doesn’t appear to mitigate pet-tiger-owners’ desire to save them as well. For them, conservation is ultimately about providing a safe and loving home to a seemingly homeless endangered animal. According to this brand of conservation ethics, all a tiger really needs is a healthy dose of human love. And love the animals they do. Many cherish their tigers even after (or perhaps because of) evidence of their anti-human ferocity. One pet tiger bit the head of his owner, ripping his jaw and ear canal out of his skull. The recovered owner still owns two Bengal tiger cubs and four adult tigers. He said the mauling ‘hasn’t changed the way I look at them.’ Another woman let her daughter sleep with a tiger cub, which later severed the10-year-old girl’s carotid artery and killed her.
These adored tigers and their adoring owners may symbolise the final conquest of a novel kind of ecological imperialism. The living, roaring animal, ‘its repertory stunted by the impoverished constraints of human care,’ as biologist E O Wilson put it, is subdued in its cage as an unlikely plaything, ‘a mute speaker trapped inside the unnatural clearing, like a messenger to me from an unexplored world.’
But pet-tiger-owners’ passion for the animals is real. ‘I feel it’s my mission to save these animals from extinction,’ Joan Byron-Marasek says. ‘I know I’m doing it better than any other place.’
Sonia Shah is a freelance writer for the online magazine ZNet. She is the editor of Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire and a former editor/publisher at South End Press.
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