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While you might have heard in a lot of the “captive big cat crisis” messaging that cubs that leave zoo settings to go into the private sector go missing and end up never being heard from again, that’s not realistic now that we’re almost 20 years into the 21st century. The prevalence of smartphones and the proliferation of the “cute exotic animal” social media frenzy means that pretty much as soon as a cute cub is photographed or filmed in any way, they’ll end up on the internet. Even if the public doesn’t hear about it immediately, the authorities absolutely keep an eye on that sort of media, and do follow up to make sure animals seen online were acquired legally. Most facilities that breed large cats and move them between facilities are part of the Captive Bred Wildlife permitting program, which means that births, deaths, and transfers are tracked in records that must be available to Fish and Wildlife upon request. Given that even PETA is willing to put in writing that there are only a few breeders in the US putting out cubs in enough volume to contribute to the overpopulation problem, it’s really not hard to figure out the origins of the few cubs that are sold illegally. 

Here’s a case study: the tiger that appeared in that Logan Paul video in 2017. 

Yup. This bullshit. In early December of 2018, headlines started appearing about how the October 2017 video in which Logan Paul forced his stressed out dog to meet a baby tiger had landed him in controversy… because the tiger was owned illegally… and it resulted in the tiger’s owner being arrested. After getting past the “of course that happened” reaction because ugh, Logan Paul, I decided to try to figure out where that tiger came from and where he went. Nothing published mentioned where the cat was bought from, and while news articles said it was placed with a wildlife sanctuary or large animal rescue (some specifying L.A.), there was no specific facility information released. 

Cat land is small, so the next thing to do was apply some logic. The tiger in the video was young enough to have to have been sold / given away as a cub, has to be a generic (sub-species hybrid aka mutt) tiger, and had to have been sourced from out of state due to California’s ban on private big cat ownership.  There are only a few places breeding lots of generic tigers in the US right now, and only certain ones would be willing to sell a cub that young to some random dude. There’s only one of them currently facing federal charges for violating federal wildlife law for selling big cats illegally across state lines, so that’s a reasonable place to start. 

In addition to being on trial for repeatedly trying to take a hit out on the CEO of Big Cat Rescue, Joe Exotic (a/k/a Maldonado-Passage or Schreibvogel) has also been indicted for multiple violations of the Endangered Species Act and the Lacey Act: these include not only shooting multiple tigers at his facility, but interstate commerce without a permit and falsifying paperwork to make the sales look legal. I pulled up the the court filings to see if any of the charges matched the timeline of the video being filmed. Of the 12 specific sales documented, all had known destinations and dates that didn’t match - but other charges in the document state that that “on or about October 30, 2017, in the Western District of Oklahoma and elsewhere, [Joe] knowingly and unlawfully offered for sale in interstate commerce endangered wildlife, namely two tiger cubs (Panthera tigris).” Since the exact dates of the sale aren’t known, and the video was posted October 21st, that’s plausibly the right timeline. 

A little bit of social media digging found Joe Exotic posting a bunch of screenshots of text messages and videos, indicating that the tiger was sold by his business partner / the guy who bought G.W. Exotics a few years ago, Jeff Lowe. (Unfortunately the video that was screenshotted by Joe, allegedly showing that tiger cub in the G.W. Exotics nursery, has been deleted from social media - along with a lot of content from the end of 2017.) Tigers stripes are as unique as a fingerprint, and so are incredibly useful for identifying individual animals. The cat in the Logan Paul video has very distinct “loops” on his forehead. I can’t confirm that the tiger cub in the screenshots / video Joe posted is the same as the one in the Logan Paul video, because while the loops look the same, there’s discrepancies in some of the other markings (like the loop on the top of the head). I found video on the G.W. Exotics Facebook page with another cub that is definitely not the Logan Paul cub with similar forehead loops, so it might be possible that there was a litter of tiger cubs with similar markings. 

(Top: Media screenshot of the tiger. Bottom: Photos posted by Joe Exotic allegedly of the same tiger and a screenshot from the video he posted.)

Either way, we know that a search warrant was served on Jeff Lowe’s Las Vegas property in November 2017, where he had been keeping sickly cubs that he was using for pay to play interactions without property permits. Joe Exotic alleges in some of his posts that the cubs Jeff Lowe was using for those interactions came from G.W., and the cub(s) visible in the documentation Joe posted appear to be at least related to, if not actually the same, tiger in the Logan Paul video. While we can’t know who facilitated the cub changing hands, it seems highly probable that the tiger cub in the video was born at G.W. Exotics in the late summer of 2017. 

So where did that cub go? Somewhere in the L.A. area and to some sort of rescue facility, according to media reports. This part wasn’t as hard to track down: in January, the Exotic Animal Training and Management program at Moorpark Community college took in a young male tiger cub. They’re recieved the call in December that a four-month-old tiger had been confiscated from a “private home” somewhere in California where he’d been kept illegally.  Moorpark kept Neil’s origin under wraps because there was an ongoing criminal case, but as soon as photos of him were put online, the big cat community figured out he was the same cat as in the video due to his distinctive forehead loop markings. 

(Photo Credit: America’s Teaching Zoo)

It turns out that the Logan Paul video allowed authorities to find Neil, but it wasn’t the first time they knew he was illegally in private hands: a recent news article noted that “In October 2017, wildlife trafficking wardens with the state received an anonymous tip that the tiger was seen in pictures of models that were posted to Instagram.” Once the media announced the criminal case in December, the general public figured out Neil’s origin pretty quickly; it was recently publicly confirmed by a post on the L.A. City Attorney’s Office’s Instagram. 

What does this all tell us? It tells us that even before Logan Paul did idiotic things involving animals and made Neil’s existence very public, wildlife officials knew there was a cub being illegally owned in that part of California; it tells us that wildlife officials are actively tracking people who are using cubs commercially and actively enforcing the relevant regulations; it tells us that when animals are used / bought / sold illegally, it rarely stays secret in the big cat community; and it tells us that thanks to the internet and social media, it’s often feasible to trace the origin of a big cat even when very little information has officially been released. 

As a bonus example: shortly after Neil’s arrival at Moorpark, the college acquired a young female cub as a social companion for him, named Karma. Neil had likely had very little interactions with other tigers in his young life before being confiscated, and it was really important that he have a companion and get to engage in species-specific behaviors. 

(Photo Credit: America’s Teaching Zoo)

While very little information has been publicly released by the organization about Karma’s origins, it’s still pretty simple to figure out where she came from. On January 29th, Moorpark posted about Karma’s arrival on Facebook, saying “a female Bengal tiger arrived a few days ago from a licensed facility to enhance the life of Neil.” That tells us that Karma was transferred from another USDA-licensed facility, not rescued, and that the facility she came from breeds Bengal / generic tigers. That means they’re not an AZA-accredited facility, since generic tigers in that system are being managed to extinction (i.e., not bred and let die off as a population). This information narrows down the options for her origin pretty drastically, because we’re looking for a facility that is breeds generic tigers frequently enough to have a cub the right age to be a companion for Neil. There aren’t very many of those left in the United States - a fact PETA is so sure of they’re willing to put it in writing in court documents. An article from February of 2018 mentions off-hand that Karma “was a gift from a wildlife park in South Carolina,” a fact which Moorpark confirms in a video about the tigers from October 2018. The only facility in South Carolina that regularly breeds generic tigers: Myrtle Beach Safari. As MBS and Moorpark are both USDA-licensed facilities, they’re exempt from the Captive Wildlife Safety Act prohibitions against moving big cats across state lines - but because Moorpark is not part of the Captive Bred Wildlife permitting program (they don’t do conservation breeding), they still couldn’t legally buy a tiger across state lines due to the Endangered Species Act. That’s why they emphasize that Karma’s arrival at Moorpark was a donation - because legally, the only way the facility could acquire another tiger as a companion for Neil was to be gifted one. 

(Photo Credit: Janeene Ward Nagaoka)

When big cats move in the United States, it’s rarely ever kept a secret. It’s incredibly unlikely that thousands of tigers could exist off the radar in country given how much social capital photos of them provide online. Allegedly these backyard cats stay completely hidden until they die, but then, the common narrative goes, the bodies of all the hidden tigers probably end up being sold in the black market. Is that really true? Shouldn’t we know if such a lucrative trade was occurring in the US, especially if there’s supposedly thousands of tigers fueling it? That’s the topic for the next post. 

I’m glad! That seems to be a common theme: facilities will say a lot on private tours and love educating people, but are terrified of putting anything on the internet.

I will tell you, though, that the information you got from that tour wasn’t unbiased. I’ve observed that Oakland’s barn sits in a weird political position within elephant land. I believe were one of the first zoos to ban the use of bullhooks / elephant guides (the politics surrounding that tool are a whole discussion of their own) and appear to me to be powerful within the California Association of Zoos and Aquariums. They’re very … insistent that there is One Right Way to manage elephants, and it is their way. They take it to the point of not really being willing to associate with the Elephant Manager’s Association (which is a group I respect specifically because of their stance that, as elephants are all complex individuals who require individualized management strategies, it is important to support the highest standards of welfare and skill for all methods of elephant handling). I’ve seen this met with varying levels of approval even within AZA barns, depending on where they stand politically. At least one of Oakland’s elephant keepers also consults for PETA (this is not the first time AZA staff have helped PETA attack other facilities, I’m sad to say) and was quoted on the massively controversial “AZA Member Partnership” poster PETA presented at the 2018 AZA annual conference. I don’t know how much that part is known among the rest of the zoo elephant management world.

Suffice to say, there are still zoos - yes, good AZA ones - that use guides as part of managing their elephants at times, and also zoos that still work free contact with some of their elephants. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because elephant care is a massively nuanced, and each and every situation has to be considered in it’s own context (e.g., the old girls in NOLA for whom daily walks is a major part of their lifelong routine, the New England barn that can’t safely switch to protected contact until they remodel, the facilities that practice “restricted contact” with specific animals). Everyone in the elephant works accepts that positive reinforcement-based training creates the best welfare states and facilitates successful learning, but the reason so many zoos are protected contact in the US is because AZA put out a moratorium requiring all the barns at accredited facilities to switch over to it regardless of what the professionals thought was appropriate for their specific animals. A lot of zoos were unhappy at the time. Some got exemptions to delay or avoid switching over. One entire barn’s keepers quit their jobs in protest rather than being forced to comply. The Pittsburgh Zoo pointed out that AZA requires all zoos they accredit to be respected as the experts on caring for their animals by all local government entities, and that by requiring all zoos to switch over to a standardized protocol that was not designed by elephant experts, they felt AZA was making it very clear they didn’t trust their own zoos to actually have the expertise they required. It didn’t go over well, and Pittsburgh was not only thrown out of the AZA but made an example of specifically to discourage future dissent of that sort; even though the Pittsburgh manages their elephants now in mostly protected contact, it was important to them to be able to choose to work free contact with their elephants if a situation required it - and that’s what AZA’s directive would have prohibited. It is still a massive industry sore spot, as evidenced by some really puerile drama in the op-ed sector of a Pittsburgh newspaper in 2017.

As you might have seen on the news recently, an intern was killed by a lion over the weekend at a facility in North Carolina. It’s not yet known how the lion escaped his secure lock-out while his enclosure was being cleaned, but he did, and after multiple tranquilizers failed he had to be shot in order for them to retrieve the intern’s body. It made all the incident data I’ve spent the last few months studying far too real - I’ve not only visited that facility, but also interviewed them for my research - and I’m not in much of a mood to keep writing about big cats right now. 

I’m not going to blog about the incident until the entire investigation by the USDA is complete, and I haven’t linked a news article here on purpose. I can’t deal with the amount of theories and nasty implications being bandied about from all sectors right now, before the family and the facility have even had time to deal with the immediate trauma much less even mourn. I don’t know anything more than what is being reported about the incident. Nothing about what happened or why is public yet. What I can tell you is that I know how seriously that facility takes their safety protocols and how much personal responsibility the leadership feels for keeping their people safe. 

I expected the animal rights world to attack them when I heard what had happened: they’re a small, unaccredited USDA-licensed facility, and they’re in one of the four states left without laws regulating big cat ownership. Regardless of the fact that the facility is not a “pet” ownership situation and the fact that most of their big cats are rescues, placed with them by the USDA in 2004 after a seizure, they’re not AZA and PETA / HSUS already had the state targeted for legislative action in 2019. Now the people at the facility, already dealing with the aftermath of a horrible incident, will be brutally excoriated in public to advance a legislative agenda - and the poor intern’s family won’t be able to mourn in peace, because their child’s death will be a talking point. What’s worse, AR groups are bringing back their federal version of the bill (which my big cat research proves is based on claims that are flat out false) and so they’ll likely take this incident and all the horrible details loudly to D.C.

What I didn’t expect is for other zoos to throw them under the bus, too. I’ve seen at least two statements so far, both from Zoo Miami’s communications director, intimating that the incident happened because the facility felt it was cost-prohibitive to build appropriate enclosures for the lion… while simultaneously using a TV interview about the incident to promote AZA’s brand in contrast. This is the same guy who told the media “it’s an accident and accidents happen” when a zookeeper was injured by a tiger at his facility in 2016. I’m appalled and outraged to the point that I can’t stop shaking. Everyone in the zoo field knows that something like this could happen to us, or our friends and coworkers and loved ones, no matter what accreditation your facility holds. It did happen to an AZA-institution, two years ago, in Palm Beach. You don’t shit on people after they’ve gone through something like that. You support them. The smaller facilities showed up to publicly support the Palm Beach staff after their tragedy, because no matter what inter-industry politics are going on at the time, that’s what you do. It doesn’t look like that’s what is going to happen this time, because the inter-industry politics are now too pervasive to be set aside. I’m not proud to be part of the industry, today. 

I’ll go back to regular blogging and answering asks for now, and we’ll return to the big cat data at some point in the future. Thanks for bearing with me. 

When I first posted this piece of research, about six months ago, readers were reasonably confused as to why it was something I was talking about. A lot of people thought I might be advocating for private big cat ownership because I was talking about trying to figure out if the number of tigers being claimed to exist as pets were real without providing any context. That was when I realized I had to finish the whole research project into the accuracy of common privately owned big cat population claims, rather than publishing interesting bits as I went.

 Now that the whole project is complete, and it’s clear that a lot of the messaging around captive big cats in the United States is pretty inaccurate, I want to revisit it a little. (If you’re just coming into this series now, check out the tag “CrouchingTigerHiddenData” for more information on why I undertook this project). This bit of work - examining what tiger population numbers were and where the hell they came from - is how I accidentally got started on this whole larger research project. 

As I started doing more original research for my post on WADTT, I trained myself to not repeat anything in writing I couldn’t track down an original (and credible) source for. At some point I was looking into something about tigers in the zoo world, and came across the claim that there were “more tigers in Texas and/or Florida than in the wild today.” I don’t remember if it was in written materials or if it was something a colleague told me, but I remember thinking that it was an interesting factoid - if it was true. 

When I started poking around to see what data was behind it, though, I ended up down a deep and unexpected rabbit hole. There was no easy answer to the source for that claim, or for any claim about the total privately owned tiger population in the United States. They showed up all over newspaper articles and websites going back at least fifteen years, and half the time they weren’t even sourced. Some authors didn’t report on where their numbers came from at all, just saying that it “is assumed” or “experts estimated” that there were however many tigers; others would interview experts from major animal advocacy or wildlife conservation groups earlier in the piece, only to later repeat an un-sourced claim and sort of imply that it could be attributed to the earlier interviewee. I figured maybe if I tracked who was saying what, I’d be able to figure out where the original numbers came from and what data they were deriving them from, even if they weren’t going to talk about it directly. A couple of months and a very complicated spreadsheet later, it was clear that wasn’t going to be the case. 

I had found a couple of academic sources that some of the most credible websites had continued to reference regularly for over a decade, indicating that there might not be newer published data, as well as a giant game of telephone occurring over time in the media that managed to thoroughly obscure any alternate sources of information that had ever existed. Here’s what the frequency of academic sources looked like when I graphed it: 

And here’s a selection of the claims I found in the media (e.g., publications that were not peer-reviewed) during the same time period that didn’t have sources:

Looking for an enthusiastic person to join our team! We need someone with…

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