What's the extent of the no-touching policy that you talked about with respect to big cats? I'm thinking hyenas, wolves, painted dogs, comparable predators. Are they included?
To clarify, it’s federal law, not any specific facility policy. The law is the Big Cat Public Safety Act.
The law prohibits anyone who owns/holds a species under the scope of the law from letting non-staff non-veterinary people touch their animals or be within 15 feet of them in most cases unless a barrier sufficient to prevent contact exists.
The species it applies to are tigers, lions, African/Asian leopards, cougars. jaguars, cheetah, and - due to an error in how the law was implemented that’s now permanent - clouded leopards and snow leopards. It also covers any hybrid of those species.
Cheetah and cloudies are the only species exempted from the 15 foot distance requirement, which is why you’ll see those species sometimes used on leash for public demos. Still illegal to touch them though.
The penalties are pretty harsh. A person who owns or has responsibility for a big cat who “knowingly violates the act” by letting someone touch the animal “must be fined not more than $20,000, or imprisoned for no more than five years, or both. The act considers each violation to be a separate offense.” The fun part is that re: zoos and other facilities with staff, we have no idea if that means the CEO would be liable or if it would be a zookeeper who made a bad choice - or in some cases was told by the CEO to allow it!
There is a lot more to the law because it also controls who is allowed to own or breed big cats in the US, but that is the part relevant to my grumping about please don’t touch big cats in the US even if someone is naive enough to let you do it.
The law was not written with consideration for zoological facilities - it was written entirely to deal with the pet big cat problem - and so most of the way it would be implemented if a zoo were to violate the law is basically up in the air. U.S. Fish and Wildlife has barely promulgated policy and tells industry folk who ask them for clarification on compliance to “ask their lawyers”. Depending on how they decide to implement the law when a zoo does get caught with a violation will control what happens in the future - and it could be as severe as making it illegal for that facility to have any species of big cat ever again. We don’t know!
Which is why I say aside from all of the other safety and ethics consider considerations, please don’t put a facility that does good work at risk if an uninformed staffer makes a mistake and offers you the opportunity to touch a cat. It’s a weird angle to approach the issue but it could have really bad consequences.
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