Thatâs a perfectly reasonable thing to assume if you donât know what the lobbying behind the law was about! Sorry, I wrote you a book.
The thing was, it was never really about safety - it was about banning pet big cats and cub petting. And it was written to amend a different law from 20 years ago (that was also only written to address what at the time was a pretty massive problem with pet big cats) which was in and of itself done in a weird way as an amendment to a law about regulating trade in illegally captured flora and fauna. Itâs janky all the way down.
In the 80âs and 90âs there was like, a legit issue in the US with people having lion farms in their backyards and shit. It was a total wild west no regulation scenario and it was actually dangerous to the communities they lived in. It was decided that something needed to be done and the way they did it was to amend the Lacey Act, which is a law from 1900 that basically says âno commerce involving animals or plants someone took, got, or bought in violation of any US law.â Thereâs a part of the law that regulates âinjurious speciesâ aka invasive species, and so they defined the big cats they wanted to ban from being commercially moved as subset of âinjurious speciesâ. Because, yâknow, they can injure people. đ
Because the Lacey Act deals in commerce, the Captive Wildlife Safety Act had to as well. Which means the CWSA ended import/export, commercial trade, and transport of big cat species⌠but only across state lines. Thatâs because as best I understand it the feds only have jurisdiction over interstate commerce in the US, and the states have jurisdiction to regulate all intra-state commerce.
When the law was passed in the aughts it caused the first big âdumpingâ of pet big cats on zoos (Iâm writing this from memory on mobile and I donât remember offhand if the big cat sanctuary industry already existed or started forming in response) because it meant people who owned big cats couldnât take them with them if they moved or travelled between states. Everyone scrambled, lots of animals were given up.
USDA licensed businesses, accredited wildlife sanctuaries, professional animal transporters, and state wildlife employees were exempt. This is how zoos and sanctuaries still continued to have breeding programs. But it didnât solve the pet big cat problem because it didnât reach into the states and prohibit private ownership - and shady people trafficked them between states anyway. For a long time the animal advocacy groups working on the topic tried to convince individual states to ban big cat ownership, but even when they did act the results were really internally inconsistent. So they looked, again, at another federal law.
I donât specifically remember without my files to hand if a specific incident that led to the Big Cat Public Safety Act being introduced in Congress in 2012, but Iâm guessing the Zanesville, OH incident in 2011 was a big part of what drove it. It basically said: look, assholes with pet big cats are a safety risk. States wonât do it. Look at all those tigers that guy let out into his neighborhood. That could happen to you, they could eat your kids. We need a better solution.
The main thing other the animal advocacy groups pushing the bill wanted was to end cub interaction opportunities. This was only in part due to safety reasons. The people who bred big cats made a lot of money off cub exhibitions, so that was part of why there were so many adult extra cats around being farmed out wherever. Cub petting is a pretty unethical commercial practice, too, so these groups really wanted to forbid it. Buuuuut they also just had really strong moral stances about anything they consider commercial exploitation (which includes like, zoos even existing) and they wanted to use the opportunity to shut down as much as they could. I have, very literally, sat at a table next to a well known flower-crowned reality TV character while she and her husband discussed how much they wanted to go after credible zoos because accredited facilities could basically âlaunderâ encounters in a way the public would support from them but not smaller, more easily maligned facilities. There was some consideration of the fact that people do get hurt during cub petting and from interactions with big cats⌠but it was by far only a partial consideration for the law.
The problem, of course, is that everyone involved in lobbying for or writing the bill had political stances that got in the way. It took a decade to get through congress because everyone tried to use the opportunity to pursue other secondary goals. The CWSA just says cool, if youâre a business that is regulated and inspected by USDA youâre exempt⌠but nobody wanted that to be how it went going forward because the branding and credibility wars had arisen. Animal rights lobbyists hated one zoo trade group, and another zoo trade group wanted only themselves to be exempt, and zoos that werenât members of either trade group had to argue they werenât terrible animal abusers and should be allowed to keep operating, and sanctuaries had their own drama and just⌠it was a hot mess.
And the messaging was so bad, too. Animal rights groups perpetuated messaging that was straight up lies! There are not and never were 10,000 pet big cats in the US - certainly not after the Lacey Act, and nobody did a thorough count before or after so they literally made numbers up. The dataset they used to list the number of big cat escapes and attacks since 2000? Also bullshit, I went through it manually myself and it included sightings of wild cougars in cougar country as âescaped petsâ and also was artificially inflated by including servals.
A big part of this was because there are a lot of parts of the country and a lot of legislators who have affectionate memories of interacting with big cats. Itâs kind of hard to explain how common this was 20 years ago, but my favorite example is that one lobby day a big zoo brought cheetah cubs to DC to meet Obamaâs daughters and this was perfectly normal and acceptable. Big name donors, senators, celebs, have often been given the opportunity to interact with animals like big cats at the most credible zoos in the US to gain their favor and support. So while US culture may now be much more in favor of a ban on any sort of public interaction with those species in any context, at the time lobbying from the perspective of just âwe think this is unethical and should be stoppedâ wouldnât have been successful. And this lasted even longer than youâd think - the bill didnât get enough traction to get over the finish line until Tiger King aired.
The problem with the bill that became law - and what has always been the problem - was that the people who wrote it were so focused on private pet big cat owners that they did not consider the fact that the law would impact credible zoological facilities. So all of the rules, the type of oversight, the punishments, theyâre all written for individuals and not businesses. There were a bunch of iffy definitions and conflicting language that I and others flagged across multiple congressional sessions that never got resolved. Thatâs because the messaging about mauled children and abused baby cubs was so successful that legislators believed the lobbyists when they said anyone asking for improvements to the law supported animal abuse.
Hi, itâs me, I donât support or condone animal abuse, but I do think we need to write our fucking laws correctly the first time.
So thatâs how in 2022 we got a law called the Big Cat Public Safety Act that is mostly about making it so nobody can have pet cats anymore, and nobody can touch the ones that places do have. The rules around who can touch animals are written to prevent loopholes, not enhance safety.
And because a lot of the big accredited zoos that supported the bill also fell prey to lobbying that told them it was fine and did not have any problems⌠most of them do not even realize that it now affects their regular operations. Certainly not enough that they think they need to educate their carnivore staff on what is it is not legal now - because they think that they are exempt, because that was how they tried to write the law multiple iterations ago.
This whole thing is just a mess.
I do not disagree with the fact that people should not be allowed to own big cats or other really dangerous animals as personal pets, to be clear. What I do care about is laws being written clearly and correctly so they only do the things legislators and the public believe theyâre supporting.
So youâre right that itâs silly that a law that would purport to care about safety does not prohibit contact with other dangerous animals. But thatâs not what this law was written to do. Safety is part of the marketing but not the actual driving force - and so it wasnât done in a way that actually carefully addresses what considerations should exist around public contact and dangerous animals beyond the relevant big cats.
