#crouchingtigerhiddendata

I have a big mad today, folks. It's a really frustrating one, because years worth of work has been validated... but the reason for that fucking sucks.

For almost a decade, I've been trying to fact-check the claim that there "are 10,000 to 20,000 pet tigers/big cats in backyards in the United States." I talked to zoo, sanctuary, and private cat people; I looked at legislation, regulation, attack/death/escape incident rates; I read everything I could get my hands on. None of it made sense. None of it lined up. I couldn't find data supporting anything like the population of pet cats being alleged to exist. Some of you might remember the series I published on those findings from 2018 or so under the hashtag #CrouchingTigerHiddenData. I've continued to work on it in the six years since, including publishing a peer reviewed study that counted all the non-pet big cats in the US (because even though they're regulated, apparently nobody bothered to keep track of those either).

I spent years of my life obsessing over that statistic because it was being used to push for new federal legislation that, while well intentioned, contained language that would, and has, created real problems for ethical facilities that have big cats. I wrote a comprehensive - 35 page! - analysis of the issues with the then-current version of the Big Cat Public Safety Act in 2020. When the bill was first introduced to Congress in 2013, a lot of groups promoted it by fear mongering: there's so many pet tigers! they could be hidden around every corner! they could escape and attack you! they could come out of nowhere and eat your children!! Tiger King exposed the masses to the idea of "thousands of abused backyard big cats": as a result the messaging around the bill shifted to being welfare-focused, and the law passed in 2022.

The Big Cat Public Safety Act created a registry, and anyone who owned a private cat and wanted to keep it had to join. If they did, they could keep the animal until it passed, as long as they followed certain strictures (no getting more, no public contact, etc). Don’t register and get caught? Cat is seized and major punishment for you. Registering is therefore highly incentivized. That registry closed in June of 2023, and you can now get that registration data via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Guess how many pet big cats were registered in the whole country?

97.

Not tens of thousands. Not thousands. Not even triple digits. 97.

And that isn't even the right number! Ten USDA licensed facilities registered erroneously. That accounts for 55 of 97 animals. Which leaves us with 42 pet big cats, of all species, in the entire country.

Now, I know that not everyone may have registered. There's probably someone living deep in the woods somewhere with their illegal pet cougar, and there's been at least one random person in Texas arrested for trying to sell a cub since the law passed. But - and here's the big thing - even if there are ten times as many hidden cats than people who registered them - that's nowhere near ten thousand animals. Obviously, I had some questions.

Guess what? Turns out, this is because it was never real. That huge number never had data behind it, wasn't likely to be accurate, and the advocacy groups using that statistic to fearmonger and drive their agenda knew it... and didn't see a problem with that.

Allow me to introduce you to an article published last week.

This article is good. (Full disclose, I'm quoted in it). It's comprehensive and fairly written, and they did their due diligence reporting and fact-checking the piece. They talked to a lot of people on all sides of the story.

But thing that really gets me?

Multiple representatives from major advocacy organizations who worked on the Big Cat Publix Safety Act told the reporter that they knew the statistics they were quoting weren't real. And that they don't care. The end justifies the means, the good guys won over the bad guys, that's just how lobbying works after all. They're so blase about it, it makes my stomach hurt. Let me pull some excerpts from the quotes.

"Whatever the true number, nearly everyone in the debate acknowledges a disparity between the actual census and the figures cited by lawmakers. “The 20,000 number is not real,” said Bill Nimmo, founder of Tigers in America. (...) For his part, Nimmo at Tigers in America sees the exaggerated figure as part of the political process. Prior to the passage of the bill, he said, businesses that exhibited and bred big cats juiced the numbers, too. (...) “I’m not justifying the hyperbolic 20,000,” Nimmo said. “In the world of comparing hyperbole, the good guys won this one.”

"Michelle Sinnott, director and counsel for captive animal law enforcement at the PETA Foundation, emphasized that the law accomplished what it was set out to do. (...) Specific numbers are not what really matter, she said: “Whether there’s one big cat in a private home or whether there’s 10,000 big cats in a private home, the underlying problem of industry is still there.”"

I have no problem with a law ending the private ownership of big cats, and with ending cub petting practices. What I do have a problem with is that these organizations purposefully spread disinformation for years in order to push for it. By their own admission, they repeatedly and intentionally promoted false statistics within Congress. For a decade.

No wonder it never made sense. No wonder no matter where I looked, I couldn't figure out how any of these groups got those numbers, why there was never any data to back any of the claims up, why everything I learned seemed to actively contradict it. It was never real. These people decided the truth didn't matter. They knew they had no proof, couldn't verify their shocking numbers... and they decided that was fine, if it achieved the end they wanted.

So members of the public - probably like you, reading this - and legislators who care about big cats and want to see legislation exist to protect them? They got played, got fed false information through a TV show designed to tug at heartstrings, and it got a law through Congress that's causing real problems for ethical captive big cat management. The 20,000 pet cat number was too sexy - too much of a crisis - for anyone to want to look past it and check that the language of the law wouldn't mess things up up for good zoos and sanctuaries. Whoops! At least the "bad guys" lost, right? (The problems are covered somewhat in the article linked, and I'll go into more details in a future post. You can also read my analysis from 2020, linked up top.)

Now, I know. Something something something facts don't matter this much in our post-truth era, stop caring so much, that's just how politics work, etc. I’m sorry, but no. Absolutely not.

Laws that will impact the welfare of living animals must be crafted carefully, thoughtfully, and precisely in order to ensure they achieve their goals without accidental negative impacts. We have a duty of care to ensure that. And in this case, the law also impacts reservoir populations for critically endangered species! We can't get those back if we mess them up. So maybe, just maybe, if legislators hadn't been so focused on all those alleged pet cats, the bill could have been written narrowly and precisely.

But the minutiae of regulatory impacts aren't sexy, and tiger abuse and TV shows about terrible people are. We all got misled, and now we're here, and the animals in good facilities are already paying for it.

I am incredibly proud to announce the publication of my first peer-reviewed paper! It's (utterly unsurprisingly at this point) about big cats! Specifically, it's a census of the big cat populations in federally-regulated facilities in the United States. Even better, it is open access, so free to read at the link above. 

It turns out there really isn't data about the total number of each species of big cat being collected anywhere. That's important information to have, considering the frenzy around Tiger King and pending federal legislation to regulate who can own big cats and what strictures it would place on businesses that do. I solved that by using USDA records to identify facilities with big cats, sort them, and use the inventories on those records to count the cats of each species. 

Some pertinent details!

- I defined "big cat" according to the list of prohibited wildlife species in the Captive Wildlife Safety Act (and what will apply to the Big Cat Public Safety Act), rather than phylogenetically. The public generally thinks of big cats as more than just Panthera, and it makes sure that error won't be introduced when discussing the results in the context of pending legislation. The species covered as "big cats" in the census are: tigers, lions, cougars, leopards, jaguars, snow leopards, cheetah, clouded leopards, and hybrids of those species.

- There is some imprecision in the census data due to the rolling nature of the USDA inspection cycle and the variable length of inspection intervals. To that end, the census results are most useful as a snapshot of the approximate population of each species and their distribution across business types and geography, not as an exact count of the individuals of each species.

- 111 cats from three of the facilities in Tiger King weren't included in the results. This was because their facility had lost USDA licensure and/or recently had their animals confiscated and moved to sanctuaries. During data collection USDA had not yet re-inspected the facilities that were identified as having receiving confiscated animals from these facilities.

- This doesn't count privately owned animals in places that aren't USDA licensed. No, sadly, I can't address the 10,000 backyard tigers claim. Yet. 

I'm so glad this is finally published, because hell yes to hard data and informed advocacy.

The TL;DR for the results: Out of 2272 USDA-licensed or federally regulated exhibitors, 448 facilities in the United States have at least one big cat. In those facilities, there were records of a total of 4103 big cats. Here’s the breakdown of the number of individuals of each species: 

The image reads: @WWF_Tigers: “More privately-owned tigers exist in US than wild ones in the world. WWF continues to call on US legislation to better control ownership of big cats, and prevent them from being laundered into wildlife trafficking rings #HoustonTiger” The image is a link to the CNN news story about the tiger. 

This is a problem. 

The number of tigers WWF is quoting here is 14 years old.

They’re from that one non-peer-reviewed census by Werner in 2005. As far as I can tell, WWF has been sourcing their 2008 “Paper Tigers” report for an estimated number of 5,000 tigers in the United States for the past 11 years. (Only 1,129 of those were actually in private or “pet” homes) The authors who wrote that report didn’t do their own census work on US tiger populations - instead, they used Werner’s 2005 paper as a major basis for their analysis, noted that it might not be completely accurate because of off-grid / hidden tigers, and ended by concluding there’s a “rough estimate of some 5,000 tigers in captivity” in the US. There has not been a single follow-up study in over a decade that has checked if those numbers are still accurate. (Except for mine, which indicates they’re not). 

More importantly, that report by WWF in 2008 found zero evidence that US tigers from the pet population were ending up in international black markets. They recommended a number of changes to the US regulatory system - like the closure of the generic tiger loophole in the Captive Bred Wildlife program - which have actually been implemented since, and laws about ownership and breeding of dangerous big cats in the US have only gotten stricter since 2008. It stands to reason that you’d expect less trafficking in that situation, not more. This assumption is reinforced by the fact that in all of the exposes about tiger farms and international black market trafficking of tiger parts published in the last couple years, not a single one even mentioned the participation of US entities or the involvement of US tigers! 

So, to sum up, WWF’s tiger account is tweeting out 14-year-old data and actively contradicting the results of one of their organizations’ own major reports. Apparently the “number of pet tigers in the US” is such common knowledge now that even international conservation organizations don’t need to fact-check it before they make public statements. 

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. 

The best place to start this story is at the end: with the conclusions my research led to me to. It turns out that what’s considered “common knowledge” “everybody knows” about the privately owned big cats in the United States is almost entirely untrue. Some of them might have been accurate once, but are outdated, and others are just flat wrong. 

See, back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there really was a problem with privately owned big cats in the United States. Before the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, you could buy and import literally anything you wanted, for any reason. This created a huge domestic problem, aside from the whole “maybe we should conserve wild populations” bit, because being giant predatory felids, those cats escaped or attacked people pretty regularly. While the Endangered Species Act helped - sorta - by prohibiting the import of new live animals and interstate commerce with big cats. Unfortunately, the exotic animal industry pretty much flat out ignored the prohibitions against selling big cats because the government didn’t have a consistent way to track privately owned animals, and wasn’t very active in enforcing that prohibition on interstate commerce. I couldn’t sell you a baby tiger, legally, but if you wanted to buy a carrying cage, I could legally give you that cub as a free gift - or you could just pay cash under the table for the tiger and not talk about it. By the year 2000, it was starting to be a big topic nationwide: populations of privately owned big cats (ones not used commercially), were completely out of hand and almost entirely unregulated. Members of the public were regularly bitten or mauled. A pride of ligers, escaped from a private menagerie, were seen roaming the mountains of Idaho. Children died when they got too close to big cats owned by their family members. Something had to be done.

There was a genuine problem with the way privately owned big cats existed in the United States at the beginning of the century, and something was done about it. A major law restricting the movement of big cats was passed in 2003, which cracked down on a lot of the “buy a cage, get a free tiger” type of animal exchanges, and a number of states started passing laws banning private exotic animal ownership or at least requiring people to have permits and/or register their dangerous exotic pets. A major safety incident in 2011 in Ohio led quite a few more states, as well as counties and municipalities, to pass even stricter laws which they actually enforced. Slowly, over time, most of the big cats died or were confiscated and placed at animal sanctuaries. You don’t hear about many instances of black leopards roaming free in neighborhoods these days, and it’s a thankfully uncommon event that a child is injured while getting close to a big cat. Big cats in zoos escape more frequently now than the ones left in private ownership situations. Things have genuinely changed since the ‘90s. There aren’t many big cats left in private hands. 

Which is why it makes absolutely no sense that the rhetoric about the risks of privately owned big cats and the crisis created by the sheer size of the population of big cats in pet homes in the United States hasn’t really changed in almost 20 years. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if the old claims were just stuff that circulated on the internet, but these are things that are frequently repeated as fact by organizations and groups who you generally assume have accurate data behind their statements: zoos, exotic animal sanctuaries, major animal advocacy groups, and sometimes even the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Privately owned exotic animal populations are complicated to research, but not impossible given the benefits of current technology. When educators are taught to repeat these factoids at credible institutions, and they’re even the foundation for federal and state legislation, their accuracy has to be guaranteed. What I’ve proved with my research these last few years is that commonly repeated statements like these are incorrect:

“10,000 - 20,000 big cats are kept secretly as pets across the United States” - This is highly unlikely.

“5,000 - 7,000 tigers are kept secret, living in backyards throughout the United States” - This is highly unlikely. 

“More tigers live in backyards in Texas and/or Florida than exist in the wild” - This is extremely unlikely. 

“Regulating the private ownership of big cats hasn’t done anything to reduce the numbers in the United States” - This is incorrect, all evidence points to numbers having dropped drastically. 

“The number of big cats being kept as pets in the United States continues to pose a major safety risk to communities and first responders” - This is incorrect, attacks and escapes by privately owned big cats have dropped markedly. 

“Unwanted tigers from the private sector in the United States contribute to the international black market for tiger parts” - There is no evidence that this is happening. 

Overall, these are actually really good things, because it means that the majority of the problem that used to exist has been solved. It means people who love tigers don’t have to worry about thousands of them suffering unknown in sub-par conditions, and there’s minimal risk of one of your neighbors having a pet lion who might escape and eat your dog one night. It means that regulations are working and that people are  overall following federal wildlife laws. It means that the private choices of United States citizens aren’t contributing to the international demand for the body parts of endangered animals. 

But what’s really important to realize here is that the majority of the United States - including the people who have the ability to influence animal welfare policy, federal legislation, and international advocacy - appear to be working off of outdated information. It’s common to hear quotes from credible organizations that indicate they’re still assuming that the claims listed above were accurate. Updating our understanding of the distribution of captive big cat populations within the country is crucial to informing accurate and effective wildlife policy moving forward with this new congress, in a time when even the basic protections for endangered species may be at risk. 

Okay, folks. Today I want to tell you the story how innocently questioning if there really are more tigers living in backyards in Texas than in the wild turned into a two-and-a-half year long research project, five major writing pieces I had to finish just to able to blog about it with appropriate citations, and being volunteered by my friends en masse to give a talk on tigers because I basically lost all ability to stop talking about cat data for the last three months. 

It turns out that living by a mantra of “trust nothing, fact-check everything” can be really dangerous when you start poking around into topics where there are more assumptions than sources. Because then you realize that, holy shit, you might have found a corner of the universe primed for original research, and before you know it the scientific endeavor has eaten your brain. 

I have been wanting to talk about the stuff I’ve been learning with my readers for literal years, but every time I tried to write up a bit of it, I ended up realizing that it didn’t make sense when I couldn’t give you the full story and all the research behind it - and I couldn’t use those because I hadn’t written the darn things yet. So, in celebration of officially getting all of my research written up and published, I want to take today to talk about what happens when you ask: are there really more tigers living in American backyards in Texas than in the wild?

A tiger at the Woodland Park Zoo makes a silly face. Photo credit -  L. Bassett

... since it’s getting towards the end of the evening, we’ll take a break from talking about captive big cats for the night. Yes, there’s actually still more research left - but we’re getting to the current events. After all, I couldn’t talk about all of this in theory without relating it to current events, like that cub in the Logan Paul video!

Here’s a cute tiger having some fun with bubbles to thank you all for your patience and your interest in the research I’ve done. I really do believe it’s something unprecedented to publish on, and I hope the work I’ve done will go on to influence future policy, legislation, and animal management. The first step is talking about it! 

The discovery of a tiger in a Houston suburb two days ago has brought the topic of "pet" and privately-owned tigers back into the media. With that story, the myth that there are "more tigers in Texas than in the wild" is starting to pop up everywhere again. My research has proven that claim can’t be true.

Even though I don't have a huge presence on Twitter yet, I think it is really important to contribute my research on US big cat populations to the discussion of the tiger discovery on that platform. Twitter has a really active science communications community, and it seems like a perfect time to spotlight my work and the conclusion that there's no data behind the Texas tiger population claims.

Honestly, guys, I'm super nervous about this! I'm not only promoting my research in a much more public way than I normally do, but I'm tagging everyone from big conservation organizations like the WWF to one of the researchers whose work I cited repeatedly in the project.

If you’ve liked my tiger data write ups on Tumblr, it would mean the world to me if you'd retweet the Twitter thread or add your comments in support of my work. I love the work I do and I'm really proud of the #CrouchingTigerHiddenData project, but man - putting it out a different, more public forum is still a big deal.