#big cat data

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. 

Thank you! I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but I think from looking it up that episode is about a tiger cub that was found wandering in one of the Houston suburbs in 2016. The stripes certainly match. 

Discussions of the numbers of privately owned big cats almost always segue immediately into a discussion about all the times people have been hurt or killed by big cats. That makes sense, but uh... it’s probably important that the numbers match, from instance to instance. 

In 2017, the Humane Society of the United States put out a press release about the newest iteration of the Big Cat Public Safety Act that said:

There have been more than 700 dangerous incidents in the U.S. involving tigers, lions, and cougars, including hundreds of human injuries, maulings and deaths.

Last week, the CEO of HSUS wrote a blog post about the lion fatality in North Carolina, that says:

“Based on data compiled by the Humane Society of the United States, tigers have been responsible for half of the 377 dangerous incidents in 46 states and the District of Columbia involving big cats, with lions coming in second.”

I’m sorry, what? We suddenly went from 700 incidents to 377? What happened to the other 323 times there was a dangerous incident involving a big cat? 

I double checked to make sure the periods of time being cited were the same, and yes, they’re from 1990 - 2019. It’s not clear exactly where the 700 number comes from, but I’d guess it was pulled from the statistics Big Cat Rescue keeps, which currently number 771. The recent blog post looks to be citing the HSUS big cat incident fact sheet, which has 377 incidents on it. 

I can tell you where the difference in the numbers comes from: BCR’s data set includes small cats like servals and bobcats, and counts among their “dangerous incidents” things like animal confiscations, court rulings, and arrests. The HSUS data set only covers attacks and escapes. But it’s really convenient, right, that HSUS is fine with changing to a much lower number than they’ve quoted previous without providing any explanation or citations? Especially when I can tell you that 377 isn’t a complete set of incidents, either, because I found quite a number of attacks and escapes on other dangerous big cat incident databases (such as BCR’s and Born Free’s) that weren’t on the HSUS list.