About a year ago, on an April afternoon, Al Wolter drove to his neighbor’s house in Sandstone to help with a controlled burn. The neighbor, Cynthia Gamble, a wild-animal trainer, was his best female friend and the two regularly shared cocktails and sang karaoke together on his home machine. “She had an earthy sense of humor,” he said, an affectionate way of indicating that Cyndi could tell a good dirty joke. Gamble seemed to be most comfortable with male friends and often phoned Wolter to let off steam about personal problems. Lately, the problems had been mounting. Her business partner, Craig Wagner, had just left the state with a majority of their holdings, and her fourteen-year-old son Garrett was floundering in school.
Wolter unlocked Gamble’s front gate and, seeing that his friend wasn’t around, shot hoops for a while with Garrett. The two then walked through a pasture where a musk ox grazed and headed toward the modified pole barn Garrett shared with his mother. Inside the barn, the living quarters were separated by sliding glass doors from a row of twenty large cages. Three of the cages contained tigers, the B-grade animals Gamble had agreed to keep when her exotic-cat business, the Center for Endangered Cats, went bust. The animals were not trainable and Wolter knew that Gamble took care of them only because they had nowhere else to go. One in particular, a ten-year-old Bengal named Tango, was notably vicious. Said Wolter: “She knew this tiger was a killer.”
Cyndi wasn’t afraid of the tigers, cougars, jaguars, servals, coyotes, and caracals she’d trained and worked with for more than twenty years. Nor did she kid herself by considering them pets. She followed meticulous feeding procedures, especially with the tigers, which could consume more than ten pounds of food per day. Feeding them wasn’t what you’d call fun. It meant opening a small, six-by-eighteen-inch window and throwing in large chunks of the meat she kept in a freezer. Once, when Wolter was helping out, he tossed a slab and missed the window. When he moved forward to retrieve it, Gamble hollered in a booming voice, “Get out of there!” Wolter leapt back in a heartbeat.
Garrett entered the section of the barn where the cats were kept and walked toward Tango’s cage, which was partially covered by a sheet of plywood. Something made him yell and run for a .22 rifle, calling to Wolter to shoot the tiger. Unarmed, Wolter approached the cage, where Tango was roaring and leaping against the sides. A safety door—a remotely controlled guillotine contraption—had been left open, which was unusual, not to mention dangerous. It was then that he looked beyond the piece of plywood and saw a tableau that will remain with him always. His friend Cynthia Gamble’s nude and destroyed body lay limp on the floor of the tiger’s cage. Tango had stripped her of clothing before eating her breasts and both arms up to the elbows and then licking her clean of blood.
The tiger had to be tranquilized in order to retrieve Gamble’s body. And then, of course, it was killed. The news cameras rolled and reporters tried to explain how such a situation had come to be. They concluded that Cyndi, who two years previously had filed for bankruptcy and taken a job at a local casino, had been struggling to scrounge up enough meat to keep the tigers adequately fed. In fact, she’d fallen back on donations of road-killed deer. The tiger, given the opportunity, had attacked because it was starving. Tango and the other two cats were at least one hundred pounds underweight.
And so it was that Cyndi Gamble—passionate animal lover, professional wrangler in films and demonstrations, author, film editor, conservationist, amateur biologist, mother, wife, daughter, and ultimately victim to her life’s work—became the tragic public face of a very private and reticent network of exotic-wildlife owners. For that brief moment, the lights flashed on and the average person realized that some of their fellow Minnesotans kept tigers and lions and bears in their backyards next to swing sets and tomato plants. And then, just as suddenly, the lights flashed off again.
More videos of wild cat interactions:
Lion hugs a woman.
Lion hugs a man emphatically.
Lion greets an old friend -- a man he hasn't seen for a year.
Lion and ferret play.
The Baskin comment was the most arrogant piece of drivel I have ever had the displeasure of reading. Will someone please explain to me what a person's weight or hair color has to do with their ability to responsibly raise and bond with an animal? Is this woman truly as
narcistic as her rantings would have her appear? She sounds like a truly dispicable human being.
Sari Gordon's spent over a year trying to gain trust from a community repeatedly burned by media’s tabloid mentality. The article was driven by a magazine editor's interest in our exotic world after a tiger killed its owner. Knowing that, red flags went up in many minds and so she lost many opportunities for cooperation.
Cat Scratch Fever mentions the Feline Conservation Federation and its annual convention. Sari did not attend many of our events, and many of our members were suspicious of her intentions. Having nothing to be ashamed of, I shared with Sari about my husband and myself and our devotion to our cats, captive breeding and conservation. This view gained only a tiny mention in Cat Scratch Fever. Most of her story focuses on the negative. I am told this is because the Rake editor had final say, and I assume a profit motive that knows negative news sells better than positive resulted in much of Sari’s writing on the cutting room floor.
I chose to express myself to Sari because I believe in what I do and I will defend my efforts on behalf of the FCF. I will continue to try to inform the media. I appreciate that Sari included her interview with another FCF member who shared her observations of what we all know; this generation of kids is too far removed from nature, and it will only get worse if animal rights (AR) movement has its way.
It is increasingly important for the media to report on real dangers of a world devoid of our private sector wildlife populations. When will the media wake up to the serious problems going on with Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) and their member zoos? . . The metropolitan zoo economic struggles, the incompatibility of combining breeding programs with intensive daily exhibiting, the failure for species managers to interest enough zoos into housing species to properly run an Species Survival Program (SSP), the many inherent difficulties of managing such small gene pools, not to mention the serious health problems endemic in some of the species chosen for management.
The animal rights fanatics keep complaining that "11 states have not passed legislation and still allow private ownership" - what that really means is that 39 states have made it nearly impossible to provide any captive habitat of any sort, - and animal rights is not done yet. Next year they will have to change their chant to “9 states have not passed any legislation”, because mislead legislators passed new laws that prohibit the entire available private captive habitat in two more states.
State and local regulations developed to be punitive rather than constructive are forcing responsible owners and professional facilities to send their felines into increasingly overcrowded sanctuaries, the last available habitat for felines. I am alarmed at the number of sanctuaries being founded by persons who subscribe to the animal rights agenda that wants the entire captive population rounded up into non-breeding concentration camps and managed into extinction.
Endangered and threatened feline species populations preserved in captivity by the private sector are being so completely de-stabilized by ban laws that in the next decade that they will disappear from our society and there will be no bringing them back. The grandchildren of this generation will not have the opportunity to see these felines, let alone ever touch them. It is said that we will only love what we know. . . I see a future world full of different breeds of cars and computers and cell phones and not much else.
None of this is necessary because education is always the answer. Problems can be solved by knowledge. America and legislators are listening to those who offer no educational programs, no science, and no encouragement. They are empowering animal rights, a religion that believes that they must take all life forms from us and sever all human contact with them forever.
The Feline Conservation Federation is to be commended for developing and teaching its basic wild feline husbandry courses, for our members who mentor new owners, for all the knowledgeable and sharing articles published in our Journal, for our willingness to raise funds and support conservation through FCF research grants, for each of our efforts to build habitat for threatened and endangered cats, for sheltering these noble creatures from danger and providing them medical care, for educating everyone we meet about these great felines, and for volunteering our time and knowledge to help other owners and to support conservation of the wild.
Lynn Culver,
President, Feline Conservation Federation
For every Cynthia Gamble there are thousands of animal owners who do quite well each year, who enjoy their ownership and their companions with few problems outside of the ordinary. It takes an especially negative view of life to make the circumstances of her death the "public face" of animal ownership.
To answer most of Carole Baskin's statements, I have to say, "I know you are but what am I?" This whole spiel that she wrote here describes herself and fortunately for the reader, she lost control of her rhetoric enough that she pretty well rips herself as well as her targets. Just compare it with the information that she gives about herself on her own website. Also, writers like Leonora Anton provide some clues into the character of this person who is a big cat owner at the same time that she does not like other big cat owners at all:
http://bigcatnews.blogspot.com/2007/11/st-pete-times-big-cat-fight-by-le...
Anton talks about how Baskin's enemies are intent on using her past against her, but look at how Baskin talks about the pasts of other big cat owners and she started it. In her Big Cat Fight article, Anton talks about information that Baskin gave about herself, and you don't have to read between the lines. It's right there. Baskin was a teenage runaway who left an abusive home at the age of 15, took up with a mean drunk (15 year old girl, mean drunk of either gender, you fill in the blanks), then married another abuser, and just after leaving that abuser, took up with a married man by the name of Don Lewis, who she eventually married.
For crying out loud, do some research and shuffle some names around, and Carole's long rant here against private owners becomes her own biography. Then you may realize that she actually believes that she has turned it around by becoming horribly negative and vicious against her own past and anyone who has had problems like she had. She also seems unable to understand why people would fight back who she has hurt, is hurting, or is trying to hurt.
Maybe Carole Baskin simply can't understand the love of animals and like the stereotypical frigid nymphomaniacal person, she immerses herself in them to try to find out what a love of animals actually is. If she has found out I haven't heard about it and the way she talks looks like she hasn't. She even rails viciously against those who have had the experience.
A perfectly normal human being knows what it is like to feel the love that a tiger can have for a human, or humans in general, and does not feel any need to put down other people for associating with tigers. Substitute the name of any other species, including human, if you want. Humans who have any clue what it is like to be a normal human, same thing. Normal or near normal humans also understand acceptable risk.
Carole Baskin props herself up by exploiting her own rage against herself, which she has projected against the rest of the world. It's too easy for people to do this when this society needs anything but, but people drink it up and even pay for it when they should know better. She has also hitched her wagon to the animal rights groups, and those groups are collections of people who are spiteful against other humans and who only use the idea of love of animals as a weapon against other humans. As if the defects of her philosophy would not be painfully obvious without her affiliations with animal rights and her use of animal rights nastiness. Her "passion" is simply rage against the world and her mission is simply destruction.
Leaving Baskin behind, and we needed to leave her behind more than ten years ago, there are many good reasons why the relationship between humans and animals should be hands-on, and why there is much to gain. Humans tend towards kindness to animals. This is why the shock and horror against Michael Vick's alleged actions, but this is also why people take the acceptable risk to live with giant predators or even with herbivores who can kick the stuffing out of giant predators. I'll be the first to admit that there are risks and problems, but the huge benefits greatly outweigh them. Humans can do more than any other species on Earth to maintain the comfort, the physical well-being, and the joy of living of any other living species. We have every right to think well of ourselves. We also have every right to enjoy associating with, living with, and caring for animals. We have earned the right.
Tom, I don't know who you are but I couldn't have said it better myself. The fact is that there are always going to be two sides to the issue as with any other issue. My problem with Carole Baskin is that she is not honest. She uses inflated and sometimes false information, and goes after any and everyone who is doing what she has done (she has lived her dream and now wants to deny it for everyone else) and is STILL doing. If you ask me she needs to get rid of all of her CATS! She talks the talk but she DOES NOT walk the walk! I have my very own page of,you guessed it, LIES and incorrect information on her web site because I sent a legitimate complaint to the BBB reguarding her poor business ethics and abuse of there BBB logo (my letter to them is also on her site) you ask how did she know? The BBB sent the letter to her. I guess MONEY can by ANYTHING now days.
Dear Carole Baskin, your attempt to psychoanalyze exotic animal owners can be interpreted as practicing medicine (psychiatry in this case) without a license. Isn’t that illegal in the state of Florida? Maybe you need to ask your husband ,the attorney, he should know ...
BTW, how do I fit in, you call female pet exotic animal owners fat, but the Rake magazine article claims I have a stripper body, so what’s up pussycat?
Who Keeps Dangerous Animals as Pets?
Reporters often ask, "Who keeps big cats as pets?" and their question is usually a request for contact information so that they can interview the people and get photos of them with their hands in the cages, or worse yet, rolling about on the ground with lions, tigers and other creatures designed to hunt and kill animals far more powerful than humans. It gets attention to publish such photos and that sells papers and ad space, but it also helps perpetuate the false notion that man can control such magnificent beasts. It is a romantic notion that attracts even the most intellectual in our society when we see such images splashed across the page.
As is often the case, the media is looking for eye candy and bizarre tales to titillate the public because the public is often deemed too dull to really understand matters of substance. It is a self perpetuating prophecy then that reporting entertainment and calling it news creates a society that is apathetic toward real news because it isn't considered main stream, and thus is often labeled as being the work of zealots with some imagined, anti cultural agenda.
Little do the reporters know that when they ask the question, "Who keeps dangerous animals as pets?" they are really asking one of the more profound sociological questions of our age. There is a stereotype; and as someone who grew up being described as a beautiful blonde (who would, of course, be stereotyped as dumb) I disdain stereotyping more than most, but if there is anything at which I excel, it is recognizing a pattern.
Despite my lack of formal education I score at the genius level in IQ tests because the tests do not measure what you know, but rather measure one's ability to recognize a pattern. I became successful in real estate investment by looking at hundreds of properties before buying one. I look at entire trends, or patterns of growth in areas to determine the best deals. I taught myself how to do all of my own legal work by pulling case files of similar cases and looking for what they all had in common and emulating the process. There was a time when I had 60 such foreclosures, evictions and quiet title suits pending in the same year and did them all pro se. I only ever lost one case and won it on appeal. After rescuing 56 lynx from a fur farm and discovering there was virtually nothing available in the literature to enable me to care for the cats I began meticulously detailing every meal, every incremental gain in weight and every observation in order to compile the data into information that could then be relied upon for future reference. This website is a culmination of much of that research and again, I taught myself how to build a website by looking at others and seeing what the good ones had in common.
Regardless of the topic, there will always be exceptions to the rules, but in the case of people who possess wild animals those exceptions are so rare that they even further emphasize the commonality of the rest. The traits are so apparent in the manner of the person and the nature of their handiwork, whether it be a web site, a blog or the way that they exploit the wildlife in their possession that even the most gullible can see through the transparent veneer.
Some of the characteristics are embraced by both genders and others are gender related.
What is almost universally shared by those who keep wild animals as pets, or props and even most of those who operate private zoos and sanctuaries is that they are uneducated, poor, unattractive, hot tempered, attention seekers. Marked differences in the genders are that men are usually slovenly, womanizing, have a criminal history or leanings, and are dependant on drugs or alcohol to manage their depression. Whereas women are most often blonde, fat, have low self esteem, are childless or estranged from their families, and prone to rages of jealousy. This generalization may sound harsh but you don't have to be a genius to observe the people involved and verify the validity of such statements yourself.
These characteristics are interrelated for obvious reasons. Those who are uneducated and unattractive have fewer opportunities for wealth, but it is human nature to blame others for misfortunes, rather than to look within, thus causing jealousy and rage. With a world of information at our fingertips, ignorance still passes from generation to generation because in some cases there is an expectation of the child that they can never do better than their parents. A child raised in an environment of domestic violence and expected entitlement without work is likely to grow up into an adult with the same attitudes and behavior. Thus it comes as no surprise that generation after generation of "tiger tamers" continue to try and support themselves from their trade even long after the public has decided that these are unacceptable ways to treat any animal.
Considering these personal traits it also makes clear the necessity of having something that makes them feel good about themselves. In the case of those who make pets of wild animals, there is a universal need on their part to portray themselves as having a bond with the wild that other "mere mortals" cannot achieve. They will always tell you that they have a special gift or training that sets them apart, so that THEY can pet the tiger, but YOU cannot. They call themselves "Educators" and drag their wild animals around from flea market to fair ground, espousing the reasons that OTHER people (the mere mortals) should not attempt to have these as pets, because only THEY are special enough to have such a pet. Roy Horn would surely have uttered the same sentiments just minutes before his tiger, Montecore, nearly killed him on stage in Las Vegas.
If you meet an exotic pet owner without a boa around their neck, or a tiger on a chain, within two minutes they have pulled out a dog-eared photo album of all of their pictures of them restraining animals that would never allow a human near them if they had the choice. In their eyes it is an immediate way to even the playing field and let others know that they are equals, if not superior. The overwhelming need to do so is a manifestation of the great lack of self esteem they feel but dare not admit, even to themselves. The mood elevating drugs (legal and illegal) and the alcohol are the only ways they can deaden themselves to the pain that cannot be remedied no matter how much they talk about their wild animal connection.
Abusing their animals and their families cannot give them a lasting sense of power. That is why they are often unmarried and estranged from their families. Their families can break free from them, but the animals are kept chained and caged, the way they might well have kept the people in their lives were it not an offense that could land them in jail. Men who could not attract a woman in any other way will often find that women (the blonde, overweight ones who have little sense of self worth) will do anything to please including cleaning his cages, his house and his underwear and giving him the affection that no woman of any self confidence would.
On the flip side of this gender role is the woman who is so physically and emotionally undesirable that no man will have her, but if she has a back yard full of tigers she can attract the attention of young men who come seeking a way to prove their manhood by subduing a wild animal that would kill him in an instant were the two to meet in a natural situation. It is the same unquenchable desire to feel empowered without paying the price of self introspection and change and could be likened to the gambler's quest for easy money without work.
By the early 1990's science was beginning to discover the extent to which animals exhibited intelligence and emotion. Anyone who has ever had a pet cat or dog could tell you that they are intelligent and that they feel loneliness, anger, resentment, embarrassment, joy and a host of emotions, but it took science hundreds of years to catch up. Keeping wild animals captive began to be considered cruel and self serving as people became aware of the fact that the tiger in the cage could experience the pain of being held against his will. It became fashionable then for exotic pet owners to call themselves "educators" and some even manage to give an educational spiel but it doesn't matter how good the message may be; if you are standing their with a cougar on a leash, no one is hearing the message. They are just thinking how cool it would be if they could have a cougar on a leash. The litmus test is the fact that these people were not doing conservation education before they needed that label to justify their behavior and the minute they can't use the animal as a prop they wouldn't choose to be in the education business.
The roadside zoo operators and pseudo sanctuarians are, in many cases, just a more organized version of the exotic pet owner and have found ways to get the public to support their delusions of grandeur. They portray themselves as rescuers and martyrs for their cause. When they are poor and filthy and uneducated they can tell themselves and others that it is because they are so altruistic that all of their time and energy is being sacrificed for the good of the animals they have saved. They quickly learn that high profile rescues and having cute babies around bring in donations. They claim to breed the animals to save them from extinction, when none of the animals in these collections are really involved in any conservation breeding programs. They claim to be educating the public to save habitat and the planet by taking their cats out to parking lots in circus wagons and setting up a donation jar. Some do a better job of fooling the public than others and the media often plays into their hands, but the only real purpose they serve is their own self aggrandizement and a way to pay their bills without having to get a real job.
This becomes abundantly clear when they have rescued dozens, or hundreds of animals and found that it is a reverse pyramid scheme that is ultimately doomed to collapse. While babies and new rescues generate money, they also add to the mouths that ultimately need to be fed. In some sanctuaries there is a practice of rescuing animals, for whom they have no space, and them forcing these animals to live in overcrowded groups. This is especially heinous in the case of big cats who are solitary by nature and hard wired to kill each other if they come in contact. That fact plays into the hands of these most abusive personalities. In some pseudo sanctuaries certain animals, deemed "too dangerous" are killed for no apparent reason than to make room for more rescues.
These exploiters can rescue far more cats if the cats kill each other and for that reason these places are often closed to the public. If the fighting and killing becomes known to the public it is rationalized by the sanctuarian who protests that it is the cat's fault if they won't get along, claiming that they did their part to rescue the animal and if it insists on getting killed, then it is the animal's lack of gratitude at fault. The same irrational reasoning is used to excuse why they do not provide medical care for the animals by caustically replying to you, as if you were the idiot, that these animals don't get medical care in the wild. The same excuse is used for not providing contraception and the side benefit they get from that is that the cubs produced are often food for the rest of the animals in the group and if they need a new baby for photo ops or for media attention there is always one to use. In order to cover their misdeeds the policies in these kinds of places are to not give the animals names, under the guise of avoiding anthropomorphism, but the real reason is because there are virtually no state or federal laws that require positive identification of the animals and not having a name makes it even harder to track what has happened to an animal after it was "rescued."
These operations invariably implode. When they do, the owners move away, abandon the animals, and tell themselves and the world that they have done their part and must retire because it has taken all they had, which was nothing to begin with. They will dramatically sweep a hand to their brow and announce that they are dying and that it is time someone else stepped up and took over. When they walk away from all of the animals that they so professed to love, they do so with no feelings of remorse because they are more affected by their sense of entitlement than to anything that resembles responsibility. They move to a new place, change their name and do it all over again.
The exotic animal "rescuers" are often the most vocal in opposition to ending the exotic pet trade. They rant incessantly about how greater restrictions on wildlife trafficking will mean that they have to euthanize all of their animals when that has never been true. Where laws have passed in the US banning the trade in wild animals there have always been grandfather clauses that allow the private owners to keep their animals until they die and there have always been exceptions made to organizations, such as accredited zoos and sanctuaries, but the ones screaming the loudest have no interest in meeting a higher standard. They use the opportunity as a platform for disseminating false information and blaming people who truly care about animals for all of their woes.
Even those "sanctuarians" who do not publicly speak out against more protective laws do virtually nothing to assist in their passage. Some may pay lip service to the activity but it doesn't take long to figure out that they know nothing of the pending legislation in their state nor at a federal level. They love to cite the IRS as their reason to not get involved, implying or stating that charities cannot participate in any way, but that isn't true. They frequently excuse their behavior by saying that they "don't like politics" or will say they are too busy with their mission to get involved. That makes as much sense as feverishly bailing out an overflowing bathtub and saying you are too busy or too averse to knobs to turn off the water. The fact of the matter is that they define themselves by being perceived as saviors and if there were no wild animals to save they would lose their only redeeming feature.
Keeping wild animals, especially exotic cats, came into vogue in the sixties, largely due to television shows that portrayed a person as being special if they had such a pet or relationship. Television programming created the illusion of a world where people could live with lions, tigers, bears, dolphins and all manner of wild animals. Our society, long removed from any real experience with nature, longed to believe that it was not only possible, but that the animals preferred captivity to living free. Ask almost any woman who has a back yard full of lions what her first memory of that attraction was and she will often cite "Born Free" as being that "life changing moment." They conveniently forget the fact that Elsa died very shortly after being abandoned by the people who raised her as a pet and then returned her to the wild with no pride and no hunting skills.
We now have nearly half a century of data on the subject of people who keep wild animals captive and yet until the time that you read these words you probably never saw an in depth investigation into the troubled and delusional minds of those who are the captors. And that begs an even more important question..."why not?"
Not to minimal its deleterious effects on the person practicing it, but consider how much attention has been focused on women who vomit after every meal to stay thin. Oddly, the initial instigator is one and the same in that television portrays the perfect women as being gaunt to the point of it being an unrealistic achievement barring bulimia or some latter stage disease. You can't check out in a grocery store line without seeing headlines about celebrities weight struggles, and yet, to my knowledge, no one was ever so fat or so thin that an innocent bystander was killed or mauled by coming in close contact with people who are diagnosed as being obsessed with their appearance. Just since 1990 there have been more than 650 incidents involving captive big cats in the U.S. So why is it that you rarely hear more than a passing comment about the mental instability of most wild animal owners?
I think it may be the same reason that it took me, someone who takes great pride in their ability to recognize a pattern, more than 15 years to see what was undeniably before my eyes. To look objectively at the similarities in these tiger-tamer-wannabees meant that I had to look within as well. Not only who I was; blonde, fat, uneducated, poor, lacking self esteem and estranged from my family, but who I am today. It wasn't until I was willing to take a good hard look in the mirror that I could plainly see underlying neurosis that so many of us share.
I am fortunate to not have grown up impoverished or in the presence of domestic violence. The very thing that makes so many "animal people" unemployable; their disdain for conformity, is what makes me successful in business, so I am fortunate to have been able to turn that to my advantage. My estrangement from my family was only because I felt like I wasn't good enough for them, and once I came to appreciate my talents we were rejoined and have worked together, side by side in caring for the animals. Having overcome obesity, cigarettes and alcohol I feel empowered and in control of my own life. Perhaps if I had not been so blessed, I would never have been able to cast the harsh light of reality on the mass illusion that I once shared. Mass illusion, because it extends to much of our society; not just those who are in possession of animals who were meant to live free.
It is that shared illusion that keeps the majority from wanting to wake from the dream. We hear about a man keeping a tiger and an alligator in his harlem apartment and we say that he "just wasn't thinking." We hear of a woman with 50 tigers in her back yard and no way to feed them and say she "just wasn't thinking." We watch as the lifeless body of a tiger who was shot to death for escaping is hauled away and say the person responsible "just wasn't thinking." Cruelty is not the result of "just not thinking." The fact of the matter is that WE just aren't thinking, and we are choosing not to think about the plight of the animals because our own participation in their abuse is something we are unwilling to face or change.
We are a generation who was raised with zoos and circuses and even our religions proclaimed man to be master of all beasts, with little or nothing said about the command to be good stewards. We want to believe that our goodness is so palpable that even the most ferocious of animals would give up their freedom just to live in our homes. Even those who do not currently live that way often will say, "if I won the lottery, I'd have a pet tiger" as if to say that money is all that keeps them from indulging such fantasy. When we see that cute baby animal being cuddled on some talk show we choose to NOT think about where the animal's mother is, or how it came to be that he was taken from her to be used this way. When we pay to see a film about tiger brothers, even when we know that more than 30 tigers were used in the film, we choose to NOT think about where those animal will be a year from now.
If we acknowledge great suffering and choose to look the other way, how can we reconcile our conscience? When the answers are so easy and cost us little more than a few letters and phone calls to our legislators, and yet we are unwilling to do even that small thing to alleviate the suffering of tens of thousands of wild animals who are languishing in cages, possessed by a class of people who would be criminals if they treated people the way they treat their "beloved pets" how can we feel good about ourselves? Sometimes the truth hurts, but no one suffers more than the exotic animals when the only thing they have; their desire to live free, is taken from them.
Big Cat Rescue's mission is to provide the best care we can for the animals we have rescued AND to end the abuses that cause so many exotic cats to be abandoned. We make it easy for you to do the same at the site below: www.CatLaws.com
As I said to Lynn and others, many times over, not one person agreed to let me see their cats. "Lisa" was the only one. Even after crashing the FCF Convention (I was told by Marcus Cook, the PR person, that I would not be admitted), not one person agreed to let me visit. (Perhaps now that Cook has been freed from his FCF duties he'll have more time to handle his own problems rather than googling my name for dirt.) In fact, efforts were made to keep me away from cats in hotel rooms, the very same cats I was allowed to meet the following year. When I finally did meet Romeo and Diesel, I was blown away. I had an entirely different picture of cat ownership. Others have invited me to visit with them and I'm continuing to explore a story about private conservation as an alternative to the monopoly of zoos who currently deride the efforts of breeders who provide healthy, well-cared for breeding stock and retirement space. It's not easy to to sell a story about private conservation as it is about women being killed by tigers.
Lynn, Zuzana and others: you didn't trust me, so I didn't see any examples of well-kept cats until it was too late. How does this cycle get broken? With small town general interest stories about neighbors with servals or racoons?
Readers deserve facts. I worked my butt off (though not enough to gain entrance to the "skinny reporter" stereotype), to find the facts kept hidden from me. And the response, from sanctuary owners to private ones, is that stories aren't fair.
I did a lot of research into the numbers. Cats don't kill people who don't already risk their lives by being around them. The mortality and injury rates, overall, are negligible. Even Tippi Hedren risked someone's life for that of a cat. The laws are insane: they are hard to follow, difficult to enforce and randomly enacted. I suspect that many big cat owners are supporting presidential candidate Ron Paul.
I had plenty of information about cats being better kept than those in AZA captivity--not to mention the AZA's own instances of reckless and unhappy circumstances--but once again, where? Who? The story of good cat owners is out there, and I could have written it if I'd been given the chance.
Carol Baskin, as a cat owner and unparalleled attention seeker herself, can easily speak to the joys and dangers of living with wild cats, but has distanced herself from the "uneducated," "poor," and crazy ones by taking in and profiting from secondhand cats. Every privately owned cat is secondhand--every one is either a species ambassador, whether they are "junk" tigers or privately bred snow leopards. None of them belong in cages, but, like gorillas and a thousand other species, cages can protect endangered species from us.
If the only sources are the shocking and the shocked, don't be surprised when the media reports them.
Sari, this is hard to do. I met with a big cat owner in 2003 and even though I was introduced to him by a friend, we somehow just couldn't get a connection going and I have some idea why, although I don't know how much of it is accurate in that case.
Owners are under attack. IFAW is literally spending millions on legislation here in the U.S., manipulating people, and even buying land and paying money to anyone who helps fight against private ownership. Even some SPCA organizations are spending large bucks doing the same thing. Then we have all the chicken manure stuff going on like dead animals dumped, tigers found wandering near people's menageries, and whatever it seems to take to push the agenda. Actual physical attacks, it takes only a few of them to cause a sort of mental paralysis. I have been doing what little I can to try to free people from that, and I have to doubt that I should except for the fact that people who try to stand still will be run over.
People often don't know what to feel until they actually meet the animals. I know from my contacts with them that the animals believe in us. In my mind there is far more evidence for the positive nature of contact with animals than there is for the negative aspects, and the positive far outweighs the negative. Science fiction stories could be written about how far that could go and still be of net benefit to humanity. What we have at present is a deadly accident rate, for big cats overall, that is close to the death rate of humans handling horses, if not actually less. I'm simply not worried about it. I'm more worried about whether I will survive driving to work on ice this week. That big oak tree has laid a curtain of icy branches across the driveway that I don't dare touch. I haven't been out since Monday.
The way it stands right now, I don't actually believe that bans against ownership have actually been passed by people of good will who are trying to do good things for humanity. If they have it hasn't been for a long time. I tend to dismiss everything that is inspired by animal rights organizations as anywhere from deluded to downright evil, and I remind myself that they do what they can to make people keep their heads down instead of speaking out or forming support groups. There is such a thing as the idea of a humane organization that rules by contributing good works and by being nice to people and animals. I think that some might even try to implement this. I also think that it is the way that should be done, but the idea took hold that a humane organization could not deal with people unless they were able to threaten them into compliance. Those threats may often be the reason for non-compliance, too.
I guess that the best reason to get personally involved with animals is because this is where we live. Herbivores and predators created an ecosystem from which live with large brains and high mobility could evolve and prosper. They are still necessary to this system and we don't know all the answers. When we have problems, the thing to do is to maintain as best we can, make sacrifices, and work it out, even at the risk of our own individual lives because it is that important. To me a few human deaths and injuries are not an issue, and taking risks with living animals is far better than extinction.
Ask yourself what we ask Africa and Asia to put up with in the name of conservation of wild populations. They have nuisance animals that kill people quite regularly, a couple of hundred people are killed by lions each year in Africa. The conservationists seem to feel that this is not an issue. When you bring it to America, we have a lot of the animals and fewer human deaths. So what is really wrong when they talk about how dangerous the animals are? In America they are pretty well contained and no exotic has gone out and killed anyone. They do it at home. We're all worried about that but we're not worried about what lions do to African children or what tigers do to Asian children. Organizations run predominantly by white Europeans (I am a white European) demand one thing of people who have dark skin that they try not to even allow for people of white European stock.
I'm saying that we can set aside the fear and paranoia in favor of doing good works for the animals.