#but she is not contributing to the exotic pet trade

[orbiting-star]

say what you will about Millie Bobby Brown but that girl has a million pets and not ONE of them is an exotic pet. like she has said severely questionable things but she doesn't own a monkey and these days that's something i respect

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

Okay, so I'm gonna contribute to the discourse as someone who did research at both Khao Khaew and the now demolished Dusit Zoo, both part of the Zoological Parks Association Under Royal Patronage (ZPA). And as someone familiar with the workings of AZA zoos as a contrast.

I will concede that on one hand, standards and practices leave a lot to be desired. Unfortunately part of it is connected to the same social norms that have allowed JJ Market to continue the exotic pet trade, animal cafes and roadside zoos to proliferate, and people to own trendy dog breeds that clearly don't belong in Bangkok. And it's what leads to a lot of stereotypic and distressed behaviors passed off as cute (including but not limited to Moo Deng); this is before the toxic element of social media is added to the mix.

There's also economics. Yes, Thailand is technically an industrialized country, but in the same way that Indonesia and Vietnam are (contrast with Singapore, which is proportionately ahead of most Western countries). It's important to see what's between those gleaming skyscrapers. And that is a contributing factor to a lot of resource shortfalls for the zoos themselves; that's not getting into COVID and the ripple effect of closing Dusit Zoo without an alternative in place.

In that regard, the damning thing is that the standards of ZPA zoos are actually leaps and bounds ahead of not just the country but the region (minus Singapore; I would argue that it's actually unproductive to bring its zoo up as a comparison). Like look at Pata and the now defunct Tiger Temple; places that Westerners reveled in as late as the 00s. At least in ZPA case, they have also done essential conservation work; especially for clouded leopards, hornbills, and sun bears.

That doesn't make it any less WTF when I see a lot of clout-chasing vids that

Still part of me can't help but get defensive at the manner of fixation from a primarily western crowd. Both from those who use Western/Industrialized zoos as a way to contrast, as well as the PETA-types.

I do *not* think you yourself are being racist. If anything it's paternalistic to assume that a zoo in Thailand can't be held to higher standards. *However*, I have found a very patronizing mentality among many other western critics that does veer into racism frequently. You are already familiar with the way anti-zoo folks will take something out of context to fit their agenda; now force that through an othering lens.

At the same time, I will concede Thais are glossing over issues and practices when they rush to defend KKZ. Considering the context of how they are approached, I empathize with why they are defensive. But many do downplay and refuse to tackle the aforementioned social norm in how animal husbandry is viewed by wider populace.

TLDR: KKZ and the other ZPA branches have a ton of issues, a lot of those issues are socially systemic, and there should be pressure to reform. At the same time, it shouldn't get canceled, especially considering the important bts work it does and especially the immediate alternatives. And that pressure to reform should be accompanied by resources.

Hey there I really appreciate you sharing your research into the facilities! My intention of the posts has never been to "cancel" the zoo or to dictate their protocols. I don't believe in any sort of western dictation to other countries.

Honestly, I completely understand the defensiveness towards criticism of the handling of Moo Deng - she's an icon, she's brought in millions of dollars into the Thailand economy and the zoo's profits. Tourists are travelling all around the world to see her!

Although it has gotten to the point where their defensiveness is veering into delusion, with people insisting that pygmy hippos love it when you smack them and chase them around so it's fine actually... but I digress...

And I'm sure that the keeper thinks what he's doing is completely fine and not an issue. And if it generates clicks and views, that's good for the zoo, right? So why would they see any point in changing their practises?

I guess my hope is that maybe they might use those millions of dollars to improve conditions for the animals and the staff, provide resources for collaboration with zoos like Singapore Zoo and give keepers more resources to review and improve current pracises.

But they won't do that if their current poor animal husbandry practises are reinforced with clout and feverant defense of the keepers (it's actually kind of amazing how loyal people are to this one keeper!)

So now they have money and potentially more resources from this whole thing - but they're probably not going to use it to change practises that got them that money in the first place.

Anyway, I agree with your points and you've summed it up well!

[botw2]

if you think this i think you’re stupid honestly:

[wildlife-exoticanimals]

Fuck the pet trade

Our adorable cutie of a skunk passed tonight. What mot people don't know is that the exotic pet trade is a awful fucking industry. This poor skunk was only 1, we are not sure exactly what medical issue killed her but she did not deserve this. The pet trade good give two fucks about how they breed. Most likely she was a very inbred skunk and because of that she made major health issues. She became blind only a month ago, had horrible gum infections, her kidneys were not doing well, and was starting to have problems with her back legs..... let me remind you she was only 1.

So before thinking of getting exotic pet think of how you are contributing to the fucked up system of the pet trade industry. Don't own exotic animals it's not fair to them.

[naturecpw]

Here’s What Wild Animal Experts Want You To Know About ‘Tiger King’ Scientists have some issues with Netflix’s hit documentary on zookeeper Joe Exotic. By Hilary Hanson

“Tiger King,” the Netflix docu-series it seems no one can stop talking about, is introducing huge numbers of viewers to a world most people aren’t familiar with ― the seedy underbelly of America’s captive tiger trade.

The seven-episode series follows Joe Exotic, the former proprietor of a private Oklahoma zoo, and his long feud and legal battle with Carole Baskin, who runs a Florida wildlife sanctuary. The story involves murder, organized crime, at least one alleged cult ― and the many animals caught in the middle.

But wildlife experts have found it frustrating that throughout the series, the issue of rampant animal abuse often takes a backseat to the over-the-top human personalities.

“I fear that people will remember it as a show about tigers, yet will have learned almost nothing about one of the world’s most imperiled species,” Dr. John Goodrich, chief scientist and tiger program director for the global wild cat conservation nonprofit Panthera, told HuffPost.

In general, experts told HuffPost, they wished “Tiger King” offered more factual information on a range of animal welfare and conservation issues that come up in the series, especially since they’re so integral to the plot. Here are some of the things they would have liked “Tiger King” to explain more.

Petting Cubs

In “Tiger King,” people paying money to pet lion and tiger cubs and take photos with them is a major source of income for Joe Exotic and other private zookeepers. The series touches on allegations that at least one zookeeper, Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, kills cubs when they get too big (which he denies) and shows a jarring scene of Exotic dragging a newborn cub away from her mother. But even so, for a show in which cub petting is so crucial, it doesn’t explore all aspects of why the practice is inherently cruel.

“It requires that babies are taken from their mothers and forced into human lifestyles,” Imogene Cancellare, a conservation biologist whose Twitter thread on “Tiger King” went viral earlier this week, said in an email. “Cubs need a LOT of sleep, just like domestic puppies and kittens, and they need access to milk around the clock. Cubs in pay-to-pet operations are chronically exhausted, overstimulated from being passed around to humans, and are often malnourished. Diarrhea is common, as these babies are stressed and missing the care of their mothers.”

While tigers can come to recognize individual people and even “crave interaction” with them, Cancellare stressed that’s “not an acceptable reason” to breed cubs, take them from their mothers and force them into an unnatural life.

“Humans are not an appropriate substitute for a tiger mother, and none of what you see in ‘Tiger King’ is based on natural behavior and tiger ecology,” she said.

Captive Breeding

Exotic, along with multiple other private zookeepers in the series, claimed to be helping the conservation of endangered species by breeding them. Cancellare wishes the series had made it clear that this argument doesn’t hold up.

“The only breeding that contributes to conservation efforts are those under expert-managed Species Survival Plans, which are species-specific programs that safeguard captive populations in case free-ranging populations disappear,” she said. “These programs trace genetic health, pedigree, and ensure no hybridization, inbreeding, or crossing of subspecies.”

But carelessly breeding tigers ― combining subspecies that are totally distinct in the wild, crossing totally different species to create creatures like “ligers” or intentionally inbreeding animals to produce white tigers ― is useless for conservation and only adds to the surplus of captive tigers already in the United States.

Casual Animal Mistreatment

There are also instances of animal mistreatment throughout “Tiger King” that are never identified as such and that a casual viewer might not recognize as cruelty. Carnivore ecologist Tyus D. Williams pointed to scenes showing feeding time at Exotic’s zoo, where many tigers were corralled into a small space together to get their meal ― a practice he called “horribly dangerous.”

“Tigers are solitary animals and highly territorial,” Williams said. Putting so many together and forcing them to compete over food is “asking for tigers to get fatally injured.”

And using scenes like this as “B-footage,” as Cancellare put it, makes it harder for laypeople to figure out what’s ethical in any zoos they visit.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tiger-king-animal-experts-scientists_n_5e83ba5dc5b65dd0c5d5ba98

[awildhanmonster]

More Ado about Characters:

Alright, now for round 2!  The following characters are all more one-offs and have no direct relation to each other quite the same was as Nell/Leonora/Barnes do, so let’s see if I can keep this under novel length.  

Remy Green, aka Remy:  17 years old in current canon, and still in the last leg of high school, Remy is, for lack of any better term, a reverse werewolf: perpetually stuck in the form of a gangly wolfdog monster on all nights save the brightest of full moons.  Originally just a “normal” human kid just trying to survive through graduation, her entire life wound up turned on its head when an out of control werewolf attacked and bit her while out with friends one night.  He was subdued and arrested, even later charged for the negligence and violent assault, but the damage had been done and the virus passed on— in the worst ways.

Remy essentially suffered the equivalent of a severe allergic reaction and anaphylaxis during the first shift, which took hours (normal were shifts should be minutes) and resulted in her parents frantically driving her to the ER in tears.  She survived, though the diagnosis— for a fragile kid with shaky self esteem— was, at the time, seemingly a fate worse than death.  Despite her form, she never seems to suffer the loss of mindfulness or weakened inhibitions of most werefolk during “peak” moon periods.  

Remy has since started learning how to cope with life in a new form she didn’t really want or ask for, and she has the full, unwavering support of her parents, though it’s still a lot for a teenaged kid to handle.  I’m pretty sure she wound up being pulled from high school and is trying to finish out her last year and a half or so at home, though she could really use some friends she doesn’t think are “obligated” to love her like her parents are.  I think she’s pretty lonely and dealing with a lot of depression issues.  Luckily she’ll fall in with Wayne at some point, who’s like a sweet (greasy stoner) older brother, and he and the rest of the Losers can adopt the hell out of her as a little sister and teach her how to not give a fuck about what humans think when you’re a weirdo.  She’ll earn her happy ending eventually.  

Rose Lund:  Absolutely 100% a retooling/transplant of one of my dearest, most beloved, super shitty/earnest self-insert characters as a 12 year old on Neopets and I have NO SHAME AT ALL.  Rose is a human mage (they do exist!) around 30 or so, a pale/skinny English-Caucasian mutt with green eyes, straight brown hair, and a penchant for fancifully extra looking dyed bang fringies because she’s stopped giving a fuck.  She’s one of those rare people who can strike up a conversation with just about anyone, blessed by a very… unique way with words that’s unintentionally contributed to her internet fame as a slice of life blogger about the day to day trials of pet dragon (well, wyrm) ownership.  

Rose has been passionate about rare and magical exotic creatures since she was a wee girl, and developed an obsession with dragons (‘wyrms’ being the correct term for all non-sentient varieties) before she was out of grade school.  In college she double majored cryptobiology and spell artistry, then upon graduation, acquired a pair of rare pygmy wyrms— from temperate and tundra subspecies— respectively, as pets, both for personal reasons and to aid in her pursuit of a master’s degree in cryptobiological husbandy.

Pygmy wyrms, it should be noted, are generally terrible pets.  While only growing to approximately the size of a house cat (10-12 pounds on average) and sporting the appearance of beautifully miniaturized mythological six-limbed dragons any fantasy nut would fall in love with, they are far from domesticated, exasperatingly precocious, and have the charming habit of expelling flammable gas from a myriad of orifices when startled.  They have a distinctive, vaguely musky sulfurous smell about them regardless of cleanliness and are just clever enough to ignore training commands when convenient.  Imagine giving a very ornery, very clever raccoon flappy wings with a several foot wingspan, feeding it rotten eggs, and strapping a flamethrower to both ends, then rigging it all with an excitable hair trigger.  That is a pygmy wyrm.  Rose owns two in an apartment complex: Ice Pack (Packy), who is a pale milk white/ice blue, and Sharky (Sharkbite), who is black and burgundy/red.  

Needless to say they’re the loves of her lives and she revolves around them, having garnered a massive internet following thanks to her daily posts about their antics and the realities of exotic pet care.  They’re harness trained now and reasonably polite, though this is only due to years of hard work and constant reinforcement.  She hopes one day to breed more biddable specimens and help contribute to the conservation of the species worldwide.  Also, they’ve made her very good at anti-flammability hexes.  

Shun —: known only by her first name, a kitsune who moved into the apartment complex fairly recently with her pet pipe fox, Yuzu.  It should be noted that kitsune are particularly long lived among mythicals, though how long exactly that is tends to be hotly debated and unknown by all but the foxes themselves.  What is known is how they are extremely slow to age after reaching their peak maturity/fitness, with certain individuals reported over 500 years old and, apparently, showing very little of their age beyond a massive swath of grown tails (nine being the highest on known record).  Kitsune typically grow to around 30-40 lbs, outwardly resembling a much large. leggier, more willowy silhouette than traditional foxes, and will begin life with a single tail that splits or “buds” and multiplies over time.  

Neurologically they are fairly unique among mammals, possessing a kind of distributed intelligence throughout the body that can give the tails a “mind of their own”, so to speak, in much the same way as octopi or other related cephalopods do.  In fact, due to the extremely slow rate of cell death/turnover, a severed kitsune tail will continue to move and attempt “functioning” for weeks, even years by some reports, under correct conditions.  Which I’ll get into shortly.  

Swerving back to Shun herself, she’s an artist by trade who zigzags between traditional and digital freelance work for a living.  Conservation of mass is still in place for humanoid shifts— which all kitsune can voluntarily assume— with predictably small, delicate, androgynous bodies that rarely get above 4’5’’ or so in stature.  Features like pointed ears or slit pupils/exposed tails can be morphed or shown as desired, though the chronic perception of being childlike or “cute” regardless of how old they are is a pretty common occurrence.  Shun is no stranger to this either, and hates shopping for clothes at non-mythical-specific places because she has to do so in the *really* young children’s department for anything to fit.  

Back on the subject of pipe foxes, though— Shun is a kitsune with 3 and 3/4 tails.  She had an unspecified accident several years ago in which she lost the final quarter of her fourth tail, but managed to retrieve the piece after several weeks of searching, at which point it was already trying to become a pipe fox.  Pipe foxes (at least in this world) are the result of a severed kitsune tail’s survival instincts going horribly wrong (or right) and attempting to restructure themselves for survival, and the amount of tail there (i.e. how much was separated from the body) will determine what becomes of it, though the “starting” process is pretty identical no matter what you do.  

If a severed piece of tail has no food, eventually, with time, it will die.  If, however, you keep it somewhere safe (like a drawer) and you present it with food (which could be, I don’t know, a chicken leg), it will sense it, and you will see the start of a small, gaping fanged mouth begin to grow from the stump.  Once this has formed, the tail will wriggle itself to its prize and devour everything it can, sustaining it.  Keep feeding the tail and it will continue to grow legs, organs, features, and a face— though not necessarily in that order.  Eventually, you will have a small— usually mouse to rat sized— beautiful white magic fox, prized heavily by black market collectors for its splendor and apparent luck giving properties.  A true quarter-tailed pipe fox will live somewhere between 5-40 years, unpredictably.  The distributed intelligence of the tail will reform/conglomerate into a brain relatively on par with a modern pet dog, possibly smarter (or much dumber) depending on your luck.  

If, however, there is MORE than roughly a quarter tail chopped off, with more of the nervous tissue and mass intact, the pipe fox resulting may appear larger and more robust.  Many exotic buyers have been lured into purchasing these creatures from traders without realizing, and years later the unlucky recipient will find their precious fox’s skin suddenly flaccid on the ground like a shed cocoon, having erupted into 75 tinier pipe foxes that will summarily swarm the accessible property to spirit off with literally anything they decide is valuable, never to be found again, often raging like an infestation for days or WEEKS before vanishing forever.  

Rumor has it that feeding an entire severed tail will result in 75 tiny pipe foxes bursting forth from the cocoon shell that will each burst into 75 more bug sized foxes each, resulting in a plague of nigh biblical proportions.  But that’s never actually been confirmed on record.  

Needless to say the kitsune have a lot of protocols for dealing with severed tails and will usually destroy half-formed pipe foxes of unknown origin on the spot.  Shun keeps Yuzu as a pet due to being intimately aware of the little rat-sized creature’s origins, and she still had to sign SO many extra insurance papers and wavers before the complex would let her move in.  

I am not good at keeping it short, am I?  Wow.  Well, there you have it!  I’d be happy to answer any extra stuff I forgot too if someone has a question.  I do love these nerds.  

[oselatra]

Game and Fish ponders banning turtle harvest

Suspends licensing on importing venomous snakes.

At the urging of conservation groups, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission has sought public comment on whether it should ban the commercial trapping of freshwater turtles. States around Arkansas — Texas, Missouri, Louisiana, Tennessee and Mississippi — either limit or have banned trapping altogether. In Arkansas, commercial trappers are allowed to take an unlimited number of 14 species/subspecies of turtles from the wild. (However, two of those species aren't found in Arkansas and one does not survive shipping and handling and is not harvested, reducing the number of harvested species to 11.)

The commission included a question on the ban in an April survey seeking public comment on changes to state fishing regulations. The survey ended in May, and results will be presented to the commission at its July 19 meeting.

The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the agency to consider the ban in August 2017. Signing on to the petition were the Arkansas Sierra Club, the Arkansas Watertrails Partnership, the Audubon Society of Central Arkansas, the Environmental Resources Center and two individuals. The petition cited declines in turtle populations from other factors — pollution, habitat loss, car strikes and incidental takes from fisheries — and said commercial harvesting was contributing to the decimation of populations.

On June 20, dozens of scientist members of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature sent a letter to the commission supporting the ban. The letter cited Arkansas trappers' figures that said more than 120,000 turtles were harvested between 2014 and 2016 from Arkansas, most of them large and sexually mature.

Keith Stephens, communications division chief for Game and Fish, said data from years 2004-17 showed 1.3 million turtles were taken from the wild in Arkansas.

Elise Bennett of the Center for Biological Diversity, who met with Game and Fish officials and trappers two weeks ago to talk about the issue, said she was told that it's likely only 60 percent of the take is being reported, so that the harvest numbers are likely much higher.

The problem with harvesting turtles is that it's not sustainable. Turtles, because they have few predators, are slow to mature, and the females lay eggs only once a year. There are many predators of eggs and hatchlings, so only a few survive predators and grow into mature, breeding individuals.

For example, because of their slow reproduction rate and egg/hatchling predation, snapping turtle populations could decline by half if only 10 percent were taken over a 15-year period, a Missouri study shows, Bennett said.

Turtles "just cannot withstand any source of removal. We're just losing them," said Janine Perlman, one of the signatories of the IUCN letter and a comparative nutritional biochemist and wildlife rehabilitator in Alexander.

Missouri banned all commercial harvesting of turtles this year, and Alabama and Florida also have bans. Other Southeastern states impose limits, including Georgia and South Carolina. Texas bans all commercial harvests on public waters and is considering expanding that to private waters.

Arkansas does ban the commercial taking of three species: alligator snappers (Macrochelys temminckii), box turtles (Terrapene spp.) and the chicken turtle (Deirochelys reticularia).

While Game and Fish has gathered information on turtle harvests, it has not been able to do population studies to determine the extent of the threat to the species that may be harvested. Bennett, however, is particularly concerned about the threat to the razorback musk turtle, because its harvest was recently banned in Louisiana, and turtle trappers there will no doubt look to Arkansas.

Most of the turtles taken are sliders, which go to the pet trade. Others are being exported to China, Bennett said, where they are used both for breeding and traditional medicine. Male turtles are canned for food.

Game and Fish spokesman Stephens said of the number of people who responded to the fisheries survey, 34 percent supported a ban, 37 percent opposed it and 29 percent had no opinion.

Turtle harvest licenses have declined sharply since 2007. That year, there were 146 turtle harvester and dealer permits, Stephens said. There were only 35 permits issued in 2017, only six of which reported harvesting turtles.

In any case, a ban on commercial harvest isn't imminent. In an email, Stephens wrote, "We don't have enough current data on overall populations to propose such a ban, but if it appears to be a significant concern with Arkansans, then we will definitely begin devoting resources to look into the status of those species further. If it was determined from the research that it is detrimental to the population of those species, then biologists would then come to the commission with proposed regulation changes, which would then be submitted for public review as well."

***

If you were planning on importing, breeding or selling venomous snakes anytime soon, don't. At its June 21 meeting, the commission decided to suspend its Wildlife Importation and Wildlife Breeder/Dealer permits for venomous or poisonous wildlife species for 120 days.

Game and Fish spokesman Randy Zellers said the suspension comes as the agency is revising its caging requirements for captive wildlife. The suspension does not affect persons already in possession of exotic or venomous species. Nor does it apply to people collecting native venomous species: If someone catches a copperhead and wants to keep it, "I wouldn't advise it, but it's not illegal," Zellers said. With the exception of birds, bats, alligator snapping turtles, ornate box turtles, hellbenders, Ouachita streambed salamanders, collared lizards and cave-dwelling or endangered species, people may hand-catch and keep up to six animals of native nongame wildlife species.

"We do have caging requirements for large carnivores and things like that, but nothing for the poisonous or venomous animals that are coming over," Zellers said.

Rattlesnake researcher Dr. Steven Beaupre, who is an ex-officio member of the commission, advised commissioners that the University of Arkansas, where Beaupre is a biology professor, must meet certain standards in its facilities for venomous or poisonous creatures "to prevent escapes or mishandling that could cause a dangerous situation." Beaupre has often been called by public safety officers to help remove venomous snakes from people's homes.

In what might be the weirdest story having to do with imported snakes in Arkansas, in 2004, Garrick Wales of Scotland, U.K., was found dead in a rental car at the Little Rock Regional Airport after receiving a shipment of four venomous snakes: a 14-inch twig snake, a 6-foot green mamba, a 4-foot black mamba and a 5-foot forest cobra in a wooden box. The state medical examiner confirmed he'd died of snakebite, though he didn't identify which snake bit Wales. (Oddly, the box of snakes was not in the car; a truck driver found the box about a half-mile from the car.) Arkansas has required importation permits since 2001; Wales had no permit.

Game and Fish ponders banning turtle harvest

[orbemnews]

After the Texas missing tiger saga, owning a big cat as a house pet might become illegal in the US The Big Cat Public Safety Act would largely ban people from owning lions, tigers, cheetahs, leopards, cougars and jaguars as house pets. Zoos and sanctuaries would be exempt, as would people who already own big cats — as long as they register their animals promptly. “Additionally, the bill would prohibit public petting, playing with, feeding, and photo ops with cubs,” the Animal Welfare Institute said in an April statement. “Breeders often separate mother cats from their cubs immediately after birth, leading to physical and psychological harm as it interrupts the mother-cub bonding process and taxes cubs’ underdeveloped immune systems. It is stressful and frightening for the cubs to be passed around in crowds of people, and the handlers often physically abuse them to force them to ‘behave.’ The profit derived from encouraging the public to handle and pose with cubs is the primary driver of surplus tigers flooding the exotic animal trade in the United States and results in untold numbers of animals being subjected to trauma and abuse.” The bill passed the House of Representatives 272-114 in December. But the Senate didn’t take up the bill before the end of the congressional session. Now the bill has been reintroduced in the Senate, where Democrats have a slim majority. Animal welfare and public safety activists are calling on Congress to pass it this year, to prevent tigers from winding up as dangerous house pets in the future. “This has become kind of commonplace in Texas,” said Carole Baskin, founder of Big Cat Rescue and star of the Netflix series “Tiger King.” “Tigers are hardwired to roam hundreds of square miles, so there’s no cage that’s going to be sufficient for them. And the only reason that people have tigers as pets is to try to show off to others.” She called on senators, particularly those from Texas, to support the Big Cat Public Safety Act after a 9-month-old Bengal tiger named India was spotted walking in a Houston residential neighborhood on May 9. After a man put the tiger in an SUV and drove away, authorities and the public had no idea where the tiger was for days. While Texas law does allows private ownership of a tiger with certain restrictions, the city of Houston bans it. Six days after India went missing, the tiger was turned in to authorities on Saturday, Houston Police said. In this case, both the tiger and the public were extremely lucky. “We are happy to report that the missing tiger seen in a Houston neighborhood last week has been found and appears to be unharmed,” Houston Police wrote in a tweet on Saturday. Even though India wasn’t fully grown, the tiger already weighed 175 pounds and was “extremely powerful,” Houston Police Commander Ron Borza said. “If he wanted to overcome you, he could do it instantly,” Borza said. “In no way shape or form should you have an animal like that in your household. That animal can get to 600 pounds. It still had his claws, and it could do a lot of damage if he decided to.” On Sunday, India was taken to Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch in Murchison, Texas. The animal sanctuary is owned and operated by the Humane Society of the United States. “We are staunch supporters of the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which would limit private ownership and public contact with these dangerous animals,” said Noelle Almrud, senior director of the sanctuary. She said it costs about $10,000 to $20,000 a year to feed and care for a tiger. “We have over 800 animals, over 40 different species. Most have come from cruelty, neglect or law enforcement seizures,” Almrud said. While juvenile tigers like India might seem cuddly and playful now, “as an adult, he can be deadly,” Almrud said. “It’s our goal to not have these animals as pets. They do not belong in people’s homes. They belong in the wild.” CNN’s Daniella Diaz, Claudia Dominguez and Dakin Andone contributed to this report. Source link Orbem News #Big #BigCatPublicSafetyAct:OwningbigcatsashousepetsmightbecomeillegalintheUS-CNN #cat #House #Illegal #Missing #owning #pet #saga #Texas #Tiger #us

[ezatluba]

How Do We Prevent Pets from Becoming Exotic Invaders?

Outlawing possession does not appear to stem the release of alligators, snakes and other problematic species

By Jim Daley 

October 7, 2019

This summer a professional trapper caught an alligator in a lagoon in Chicago’s Humboldt Park, following a weeklong search that drew crowds of onlookers and captured national headlines. Dubbed “Chance the Snapper,” after a local hip-hop artist, the five-foot, three-inch reptile had likely been let loose by an unprepared pet owner, say experts at the Chicago Herpetological Society (CHS). This was no anomaly: pet gators have recently turned up in a backyard pool on Long Island, at a grocery store parking lot in suburban Pittsburgh (the fourth in that area since May) and again in Chicago.

Keeping a pet alligator is illegal in most U.S. states, but an underground market for these and other exotic animals is thriving—and contributing to the proliferation of invasive species in the U.S. and elsewhere. As online markets make it steadily easier to find unconventional pets such as alligators and monkeys, scientists and policy makers are grappling with how to stop the release of these animals in order to prevent new invasives from establishing themselves and threatening still more ecological havoc. New research suggests that simply banning such pets will not solve the problem and that a combination of education, amnesty programs and fines might be a better approach. Many people who release pets may simply be unaware of the dangers—both to the ecosystem and the animals themselves—says Andrew Rhyne, a marine biologist at Roger Williams University who studies the aquarium fish trade. People may think a released animal is “living a happy, productive life. But the external environment is not a happy place for these animals to live, especially if they’re not from the habitat they’re being released into,” he says. “The vast majority of [these] species suffer greatly and die out in the wild.”

EXOTICS TO INVASIVES

Owners sometimes release alligators, as well as other exotic pets such as snakes and certain varieties of aquarium fish, when they prove too big, aggressive or otherwise difficult to handle. But unleashing them on a nonnative habitat risks letting them establish themselves as an invasive species that can disturb local ecosystems. According to one estimate, nearly 85 percent of the 140 nonnative reptiles and amphibians that disrupted food webs in Florida’s coastal waters between the mid-19th century and 2010 are thought to have been introduced by the exotic pet trade.

A study published in June in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment found this trade is already responsible for hundreds of nonnative and invasive species establishing themselves in locations around the world. Examples range from Burmese pythons—which can grow more than 15 feet long and dine on local wildlife in the Florida Everglades—to monk parakeets, whose bulky nests atop utility poles and power substations around the U.S. cause frequent fires and outages. And because of the growth of direct-to-consumer marketplaces on Web sites and social media, “the trade in exotic pets is a growing trend,” both in terms of the number of individual animals and the variety of species kept, says study leader Julie Lockwood, a Rutgers University ecologist. “Together, those increase the chances that this market will lead to an invasion” of an exotic species, she says.

To date, the main way officials have tried to combat the problem is with laws that simply prohibit keeping certain categories of animals as pets. But the effectiveness of this approach is unclear. Even though Illinois has outlawed keeping crocodilians as pets for more than a decade, Chance is just one of many CHS has had to deal with this year alone, says its president Rich Crowley. He likens the problem to illegal fireworks, noting that bans on exotic pets are inconsistent from one state to the next. For Illinois residents, “there’s still a supply that is readily available, legally, across the border” in Indiana, he says. “There are people out there who are willing to take the chance of skirting the law because the reward of keeping [these] animals is worth the risk.”New research published recently in Biological Invasions underscores this point, finding that banning the sale and possession of invasive exotic species in Spain did not reduce their release into urban lakes in and around Barcelona. “For these invasive species, legislation for the management of invasions comes too late,” because they have already established themselves in the local environment, says University of Barcelona ecologist Alberto Maceda-Veiga, the report’s lead author.Phil Goss, president of the U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers, says that instead of blanket bans, he would like to see ways for responsible pet owners to still possess exotic species—with laws targeting the specific problem of releasing animals into the wild. “We’re certainly not against all regulation,” he says. “What we’d like to see is something that will punish actual irresponsible owners first rather than punishing all keepers as a whole.”

TRAINING AND TAGGING

Instead of bans, Maceda-Veiga’s study recommends educating buyers of juvenile exotic animals about how large they will eventually grow and taking a permit-issuing approach that requires potential owners to seek training and accreditation. “You need a driving license to drive a car,” and people should be similarly licensed to keep exotic pets, Maceda-Veiga says. He and his co-authors contend that licensing, combined with microchips that could be implanted in pets to identify owners, could curb illegal releases.Rhyne agrees that giving buyers more information would likely help. “I think the education part is really important,” he says. “We should not assume that the average consumer understands (a) how big the animal will get once it’s an adult and (b) what the harm could be if it got out in the wild.” Crowley concurs and says CHS has worked with municipal authorities to make sure pet owners who might have a crocodilian that is getting too big for the bathtub are referred to the organization for assistance. Also, some state agencies offer alternatives to dumping an animal in the wild that protect owners from legal repercussions. Lockwood says devising responsible ways for owners to relinquish such pets could help. But for this to work, “you need to make it as easy as possible” to turn in an animal, she says. In 2006 Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) established an amnesty program that allows owners to surrender their exotic pets with no questions asked. So far more than 6,500 animals have been turned over to the program, says Stephanie Krug, a nonnative-species education and outreach specialist at FWC. A few other states have followed Florida’s lead in establishing amnesty initiatives.

Rhyne says some of the onus for controlling exotic animals should fall on the pet industry itself. “If you don’t regulate yourself and make sure you’re doing your best not to trade in species that are highly invasive, you’re going to create a problem that [lawmakers] are going to fix for you,” he adds. Mike Bober, president of the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council, says the pet care community is considering ways to proactively address the problem. “We look at that being primarily based in education and partnership,” he says.As for what became of Chance, the erstwhile Windy City denizen is acclimating to his new home at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park in Florida. An aerial photograph of the Humboldt Park lagoon adorns his enclosure—but he is back where he belongs.

[mk-wizard]

One of my biggest challenges which I had to learn fast when writing a webcomic was accepting that there's only so much you can show. There are lots details, backstories and characters I wanted to showcase and even introduce, but I never got because only four books are planned and I really don't want to write a neverending story.For instance, one of the things I was hoping to showcase, but I can say now (sorry if I let you down in advance) is that I cannot show every single board member. To make for it, I will still share ideas on who they were and what they represented. There are seven board members (based on the play and the book) and they represent the seven deadly sins. However, they embody the seven deadly sins in the sense that this is what they peddle in as follows though note that I wanted to keep this as G rated as possible. I think you can guess the potential I could have gotten into;

Sir Danvers Carew (Greed) - Kind of obvious because everything to him is about money. Even his colour is gold which brings it home. His job to look and research for ways for the board to make more money. He is very good at this.

Lord Lupin Savage (Wrath) - He is a wolfman who is notorious for his temper and being a former champion boxer gone governor. He now owns and runs the competitive sports business and runs in such a way that it is fixed.

Father Ernest Basingstoke (Sloth) - He poses as a kindly priest, but in reality, he is all about money like Carew and he is a master manipulator. He saves the face of the board by playing up being a good guy who swears by doing good, but in reality, he contributes nothing to charity or society. When things go wrong, he convinces people that is somehow altruistic to just wash your hands of it and not get involved (I know he was different in the play, but I want to keep the G rating).

Lady Lilith Beaconsfield (Lust) - She is a board member who clawed her way to the top by seducing husband after husband and then framing them for abuse getting them imprisoned for life. She is in fact a business genius and she secretly runs the burlesque business and the prostitution rings of London.

Judge Matthew Glossop (Envy) - He is the judge who accepted the bribe of becoming a board member in exchange for trying Poole as guilty. His main motive for accepting the bribe was because he would now become the face of the law in London which was a position he coveted his whole life, but lost it to the late Lord Drumwell (the troll who is Sgt. Drumwell's father). What fuelled his envy further is that Glossop also lost the woman of his dreams to Drumwell. Now that he is the governor, is takes great joy is throwing his position in Sgt. Drumwell's face. However, he now holds jealousy towards him because people respect Drumwell more than him and constantly wish he was governor.

Dr. Archibald Proops (Gluttony) - This sinister goblin doctor may not look like a glutton, but he has no trouble playing up other people's gluttony which is not solely reserved for eating. Gluttony is described as consuming more than you need which can be a reference to drug and alcohol addiction. With that said, it's clear what he is in charge of.

Lady Guinevere Rain (Pride) - She is an elf who is both vain and narcissistic. She specialises in the illegal trade of clothing specifically animal poaching to sell them as exotic pets or to use them to make exotic medicine or skins. She is basically the Cruella De Vil of my webcomic.

[phgq]

Conserving tarantulas, scorpions helps prevent diseases -ACB chief

#PHinfo: Conserving tarantulas, scorpions helps prevent diseases -ACB chief

CALOOCAN CITY, Jan. 29 (PIA) --The head of the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) expressed concern over the recent cases of illegal wildlife trafficking seemingly influenced by trends of keeping these threatened species as pets.

The Philippines’ Bureau of Customs (BOC) last week reported the seizure of a package containing 20 endangered tarantula spiders and 8 scorpions at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport on 6 January 2021.

Records showed the package, which came from Samut Parakarn, Thailand, was misdeclared as “teaching equipment,” and imported without the necessary permits.

In 2019, the BoC intercepted 757 tarantulas at a mail exchange centre near Manila’s international airport and later arrested a man who tried to claim the tarantulas declared as “collection items.” In October last year, 119 tarantulas from Poland concealed in a pair of rubber shoes were also seized.

Lauding the work of the BOC, Lim emphasised the importance of strengthening wildlife law enforcement, particularly at seaports and airports, and fostering regional and transboundary coordination to combat illicit wildlife trade.

“We acknowledge the authorities’ vigilance against illegal wildlife trafficking and their close coordination with environmental agencies in the pursuit to conserve and protect threatened wildlife species. The covert nature of the trade makes this a huge challenge for authorities and requires a whole-of-government approach,” Lim said.

Tarantulas comprise a group of large and hairy spiders under the family Theraphosidae. Of the 39 species listed in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List global database, 11 are categorised as either critically endangered or endangered, 5 are vulnerable, and 5 are near-threatened.

Scorpions, on the other hand, can be found in six of the seven continents of the world. A species found in the ASEAN, Isometrus deharvengi, however, is listed as an endangered arachnid in the IUCN Red List.

Lim noted that these arachnids play important roles in ecosystems, helping control insect populations and thus helping prevent the spread of insect-borne diseases.

Also, the venoms of tarantulas and scorpions may have medicinal properties that can be valuable in the development of new drugs. Apart from their contributions to maintaining ecological balance, Lim said these arachnids may provide solutions to modern-day ailments.

“Many hobbyists and collectors, however, are willing to buy these at high prices. This demand contributes to the rampant poaching of these species from the wild, smuggling, and illegal trade. Poaching to the point of extinction may have profound impacts on the environment and eventually on human health,” Lim said.

Inadvertent release or escape of exotic animals, especially poisonous ones, into the wild and ecologically sensitive places with high endemism, could result in an ecological imbalance and potentially harm other species in the ecosystems, the ACB head explained.

She warned the public to be compliant with national laws concerning the trade, transportation, and possession of these heavily trafficked animals.

In the Philippines, under the Philippines’ Republic Act 9147 or the Wildlife Resources Protection and Conservation Act, those engaged in illegal importation, collection, and trade of endangered wildlife are meted six years of imprisonment and a fine of P200,000.00 (USD 4,100).

Also, given the transboundary nature of most illegal wildlife trade, Lim cited the need for greater coordination and cooperation among neighbouring countries, in accordance with the commitment of the ASEAN Member States.

In 2019, ASEAN Ministers responsible for Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and Wildlife Enforcement during the Special ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Illegal Wildlife Trade in Chiang Mai, Thailand, agreed to scale up their efforts to strengthen cooperation in addressing illegal wildlife trade in the region by collaborating with international organisations, private sector, academia, and civil society.

“With a better understanding of the human-wildlife interface amid the COVID-19 pandemic, our collaboration is highly timely and relevant,” Lim said.

***

References:

* Philippine Information Agency. "Conserving tarantulas, scorpions helps prevent diseases -ACB chief." Philippine Information Agency. https://pia.gov.ph/news/articles/1065257 (accessed January 29, 2021 at 12:22AM UTC+08).

* Philippine Infornation Agency. "Conserving tarantulas, scorpions helps prevent diseases -ACB chief." Archive Today. https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://pia.gov.ph/news/articles/1065257 (archived).

[lodelss]

Rachel Nuwer | Longreads | March 2020 | 28 minutes (7,033 words)

You can listen to our four-part “Cat People” podcast series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s a gloomy April afternoon in rural Oklahoma, and I’m sitting on the floor of a fluorescent-lit room at a roadside zoo with Nova, a 12-week-old tiliger. She looks like a tiger cub, but she’s actually a crossbreed, an unnatural combination of a tiger father and a mother born of a tiger and a lion. That unique genetic makeup places a higher price tag on cubs like Nova, and makes it easier, legally speaking, to abuse and exploit them. Endangered species protections don’t apply to artificial breeds such as tiligers. Hybridization, however, has done nothing to quell Nova’s predatory instincts. For the umpteenth time during the past six minutes, she lunges at my face, claws splayed and mouth ajar — only to be halted mid-leap as her handler jerks her harness. Unphased, Nova gets right back to pouncing.

With her dusty blue eyes, sherbet-colored paws, and prominent black stripes, Nova is adorable. But she also weighs 30 pounds and has teeth like a Doberman’s and claws the size of jumbo shrimp. Nova’s handler, a woman with long brown hair who tells me she recently retired from her IT job at a South Dakota bank to live out her dream of working with exotic cats, scolds the rambunctious tiliger in a goo-goo-ga-ga voice: “Nooooo, nooooo, you calms down!” Nova is teething, the handler explains, so she just wants something to chew on. The handler reaches for one of the tatty stuffed animals strewn around the room — a substitute, I guess, for my limbs. In that moment of distraction, Nova lunges. She lands her mark, chomping into the bicep of my producer, Graham Lee Brewer.

“Ooo, she got me!” Lee Brewer grimaces as he attempts to pull away from the determined predator. Nova’s handler has to pry the tiliger’s jaws open to detach her. After the incident, the woman conveniently checks her watch: “OK, you guys, time is up!”

I paid $80 for the pleasure of spending 12 minutes with Nova, but I’m glad the experience, billed as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, is over. On our way out, we pass more than a dozen adult tigers yowling and pacing cages the size of small classrooms. Nearby signs solicit donations. You are their only hope. Sponsor a cabin or compound today! In the safety of our car, Lee Brewer rolls up his sleeve, exposing a swollen red welt. “Look at my gnarly tiger bite,” he chuckles. “I tried to play it off but I was like, this fuckin’ hurts!”

It’s not the first time I’ve seen this world up-close; I spent the better part of eight years investigating wildlife trafficking around the world. During my travels, I visited farms in China and Laos where tigers are raised like pigs, examined traditional medicine in Vietnam, ate what I was told was tiger bone “cake,” and tracked some of the world’s last remaining wild tigers in India. Almost everywhere I went, tigers were suffering and their numbers were on the decline because of human behavior. Until recently, though, I had no idea the United States was part of the problem.

Within a few weeks of my visit, Nova will be far too big and dangerous for overpriced playtime sessions. Cats like her are most likely confined to one of those cramped cages my producer and I passed leaving the zoo, where they spend the rest of their life being speed-bred to crank out more adorable cubs. Or Nova might be sold to another breeder, or to someone who wants to keep her as a pet. Although no one tracks big cat ownership in the U.S., it’s estimated that there are likely more pet tigers in America than there are left in the wild. What’s more, depending on the species of cat, federal oversight is either limited or nonexistent. In some states, it’s easier to buy a lion — a 400-pound predatory killer — than it is to get a dog.

Animal rights activists have been pushing for decades to curb big cat ownership in this country, arguing that the industry is cruel, dangerous, and detrimental to conservation of cats in the wild. Now, reform appears within reach. The movement owes its momentum to, of all things, a murder-for-hire plot gone terribly awry. You might have seen the headlines in the Washington Post and New York magazine: Joe Exotic, a self-described “gay, gun-carrying redneck with a mullet,” among the largest tiger owners and breeders in the U.S., charged with conspiring to commit murder for hire. At its height, Joe’s zoo in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, which is where I visited Nova, housed more than 200 big cats, including lion-tiger hybrids, as well as about 60 other species, everything from lemurs to owls to giraffes. Joe even acquired a pair of alligators he claimed were once owned by Michael Jackson. Still, as one local told me, “The animals weren’t the entertainment. Joe was the entertainment.”

Last year, an Oklahoma City jury convicted Joe, whose legal name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, of the murder-for-hire plots against a Florida activist and sanctuary owner named Carole Baskin. For Joe, Baskin had become something of an arch tiger rival. The news coverage mostly focused on Joe’s outlandish personality and the details of his decade-long feud with Baskin. But the jury also found Joe guilty of 17 wildlife crimes, including illegally killing five tigers and trafficking tigers across state lines — marking the first significant conviction of a tiger criminal in an American courtroom. “This verdict sends a shot across the bow to other roadside zoos who are playing fast and loose with federal regulations,” said Carney Anne Nasser, director of the animal welfare clinic at Michigan State University College of Law.

In other words, the bad boy of the big cat world might have inadvertently contributed to cleaning up the dirty industry he helped build and then exploited for much of his adult life.

Simba, a Bengal tiger, was sent to an animal sanctuary, Big Cat Rescue, in Tampa, Florida. (Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald via AP)

* * *

Big cats are easier to find than you might think. I recently struck up a conversation with the chef at my favorite sushi joint in New York City. He asked what I’d been working on, and I filled him in on a bit of the Joe Exotic story and the big cat trade. To my surprise, he nodded along knowingly: “Oh yeah, a buddy of mine just got a serval!” Celebrity culture is another hot spot for exotic animal ownership. This past fall, Justin Bieber reportedly spent $35,000 on two savannah cats and created a dedicated Instagram page that quickly amassed more than 500,000 followers. When PETA criticized Bieber’s new pet choice, he posted a statement on his Instagram story telling the nonprofit group to “suck it” and “focus on real problems.”

Shopping for an unconventional animal used to mean scanning the classified sections of newspapers or fliers on the cluttered billboards at grocery stores and gas stations. But those analog methods of sale have long since given way to people hawking large cats in ways that are now more traditionally modern: closed Facebook groups and exotic pet websites. Getting an ocelot or a cheetah can be as easy as sending a DM or text, agreeing on a price, and setting a pick-up date. Depending on what state you live in, owning one of these animals might be entirely legal. And even if it’s not, there’s almost always a way to sidestep the rules, which can be confusing and are rarely enforced.

Save for a handful of regulations pertaining to animals listed in the Endangered Species Act (ESA), there’s almost no oversight of big cat ownership by the federal government. The Animal Welfare Act is supposed to ensure humane treatment of big cats and other captive animals, but the inspectors are overworked and many of the rules are weak, vague, or both. Although the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) does technically require a permit to sell endangered species such as tigers, lions, leopards, or jaguars across state lines, unscrupulous sellers and buyers often don’t want to bother with permits and deal in untraceable cash payments. At trial, one buyer even testified to participating in sales marked as “donations.” Joe Exotic used this tactic for years to evade the gaze of law enforcement. He wasn’t the only one. At Joe’s trial, that same tiger owner testified: “Everybody marks donation.”

Same goes for regulations at the state level: Loopholes abound in the legislative patchwork governing big cat ownership. “There’s lots of ways tigers have been technically regulated on paper but in practice, not so much,” Nasser said. Roughly two thirds of states have some sort of regulations prohibiting private big cat ownership as pets. In 10 states, anyone can own a lion or tiger as long as they pay as little as $30 for a license from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Four states — North Carolina, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Oklahoma — have no laws on the books at all.

Rules aside, very few people, no matter how well-intentioned, are prepared to own one of the world’s largest, deadliest predators. “Everybody wants a tiger cub, but nobody wants a tiger,” said Tim Harrison, a retired Ohio police officer and first responder who specialized in exotic creatures. These days, Harrison runs Outreach for Animals, a nonprofit that advocates responsible exotic pet ownership and trains emergency personnel to safely deal with animal-related crises. Harrison used to be a big cat owner himself, before realizing his mistake. “I was on the dark side,” he said, “thinking I was doing the right thing.”

Many big cat owners are subjected to what Harrison describes as a “baptism in reality,” learning firsthand that these adult cats are expensive and dangerous. “A big cat is like a walking, thinking IED,” he said. “You don’t know when that thing’s going to go off.” One of the most famous incidents took place in 2003 at a live performance by the popular entertainment act Siegfried and Roy. One of the duo’s iconic white tigers, Mantacore, knocked down Roy Horn, grabbed him by the neck, and dragged him awayo. First responders rushed Horn to the hospital in critical condition. He survived but only returned to the stage once more years later. Defenders of the popular act contended that Horn suffered a stroke mid-act and Mantacore was just trying to help him, but Harrison disagreed. He argued on national television that Mantacore had intended to kill Roy, and that Roy had brought this upon himself: He’d disrespected the largest predatory cat in the world by forcing the animal to do magic tricks.

No agency tracks the number of people attacked and killed by captive big cats. According to a database of incidents compiled by the Humane Society of the United States, 24 people have died and 294 have been injured in the U.S. since 1990. Those figures likely only represent a fraction of the real numbers. Not every case makes the news, and the people involved in these incidents don’t always divulge the true cause of injury. In 1999, when a family’s pet tiger killed a 10-year-old girl in Texas, the victim’s mother initially told emergency dispatchers that her daughter had cut her neck by falling off a fence.  (She’d later testify she did not recall making the phone call.) In 2003, a man in New York City visited the hospital for a severe wound on his arm and leg; he claimed to have been bitten by a pit bull — not by Ming, the 400-pound tiger he had holed up in his Harlem apartment.

Big cats can threaten more than just their owners. The most infamous example occurred in 2011, when exotic animal owner Terry Thompson opened the doors to almost all of his pets’ cages before shooting himself. In what came to be known as the Zanesville massacre, law enforcement officers had to hunt and kill 18 tigers, 17 lions, and three mountain lions, as well as bears, a baboon, and wolves. “It was like Jumanji in real life,” said Harrison, who was one of the two dozen or so officers who responded to the incident. Many of the people who responded to the call that day suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, Harrison claimed. They had no choice but to kill the animals, then they faced virulent public backlash for doing so.

Zanesville is an extreme example, but it’s not the only case of exotics turned loose. One problem is there’s a lack of places equipped to take in these animals — even zoos don’t want them. Since starring in a 2011 documentary The Elephant in the Living Room, about exotic cat ownership, Harrison gets about 30 calls a year from people desperate to find a new home for their lions or tigers. With few options, some people donate their cats to shady facilities that use them for breeding. Others abandon them. The New York Times recently reported that a woman looking for a place to smoke a joint stumbled upon a caged tiger in a vacant home in Houston. Unsurprisingly, the owner did not immediately come forward to claim the tiger, but she was later arrested and charged with one misdemeanor count of cruelty to a nonlivestock animal.

A sign warning motorists that exotic animals are on the loose rests on I-70 Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, near Zanesville, Ohio. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

* * *

As a boy, Joe Exotic raised pigeons and captured porcupines, racoons, and baby antelope at his childhood homes in Kansas and rural Wyoming. But it was the death of his older brother, Garold Wayne, in a car accident in 1997, that precipitated Joe’s entrance into the tiger business: Joe convinced his parents to use the roughly $140,000 settlement they received to open a wildlife rescue center.

Before Joe and his parents had completed the first cages at the GW Exotic Animal Memorial Foundation in 1999, someone dropped off an unwanted mountain lion and black bear. Soon after, they received a call about two tigers, a black leopard, and a mountain lion found in a backyard. Joe set out with a horse trailer and tranquilizers to collect the animals, which were skinny and malnourished. When Joe spoke to me this spring on the phone from a county jail in Oklahoma, he told me there was an excitement about the uncertainty and possibility of those early days. “I had no intention of being Joe Exotic or the Tiger King or anything like that,” said Joe, who came up with the “Tiger King” moniker because people struggled to pronounce his original surname, Schreibvogel. “But I never said no to a rescue.”

Pretty soon, Joe started breeding his own tigers. He bred some 400 big cats over the years. He sold the animals to buyers on both coasts for as much as $5,000 each. By the mid-2000s, Joe had become one of the largest exotic animal operators in the country. He owned dozens of species and put together a traveling magic show. Although Joe had been “about the animals” in the beginning, as time passed, according to Joe’s ex-boyfriend John Finlay, fame and profit monopolized his thinking. Joe’s niece, Chealsi Putman, who helped out at the zoo for years, noticed the same evolution. “It’s like he’s seen dollar signs,” Putman told me. “He figured out a way to make money and ran with it.”

Not all big cat owners are similarly motivated. For some, it’s a grossly misplaced desire to help an endangered species — not realizing that big cats bred in the U.S. are hybridized mutts that have no genetic worth for wild tiger conservation. For others, like 54-year-old Deborah Pierce, the motivation is something more akin to love, or infatuation. Pierce started small, rehabbing injured wildlife at her house and volunteering and working at a local veterinary clinic and zoo after she graduated from high school. But helping lion keepers wasn’t enough to satisfy Pierce. “I wanted one of my own to just spend time with,” she said.

Pierce was encouraged when she learned that at the time her home state of South Carolina had no laws preventing her from owning a big cat. She talked her husband into helping her construct a double-fenced pen on their secluded, wooded property. She easily found a dealer on the internet selling lion cubs for $1,500 — like Nova, “picture babies” that were too large for cub petting by the time of sale — and arranged to purchase a female cub. “I could afford her easier than I could afford a new bulldog,” Pierce said. She named the lion Elsa, and a few months later, she got Charlie, a baby cougar, to keep Elsa company.

That was 12 years ago. Pierce’s perspective has since changed. She’s emptied her savings account on her cats. They eat $5,000 worth of meat a year and the veterinary bills run around $10,000 annually. Last year, the county hit her with an $1,100 fine for not having the proper paperwork. (South Carolina started regulating big cats in 2018.) Pierce no longer has time to ride horses, her other great love, and her husband left her in 2016, breaking not only her heart, she said, but also Charlie and Elsa’s. She’s put a dream of moving out to Arizona on hold as well. State laws there strictly regulate private ownership of big cats, and finding a sanctuary where Elsa and Charlie could stay has proven too difficult. “They’re my best friends,” Pierce said, “but if I had it all to go over again, I wouldn’t have gotten them.”

At this point, Pierce has resigned herself to the long haul, perhaps as many as another eight years given the lifespan of captive big cats. “I just want to be able to give Elsa and Charlie a happy life,” she said. “Their happiness is more important than mine, in my eyes.”

A month after I visited Pierce, she emailed with bad news. Charlie had died in surgery. “His heart was still beating, but he wouldn’t breathe when the oxygen came off,” she wrote. “So, we let him slip away.” Elsa, she says, has been inconsolable, and Deb blames herself for not bringing Charlie to the vet earlier. The bill for Charlie’s last visit, which totaled $4,800, even after the vet gave Pierce a significant discount, has only added to her stress. “I just hope nothing happens to Elsa before money is available again,” she says. “That’s my number one worry right now.”

  * * *

  The modern exotic animal craze traces back to the ’70s and ’80s and a phenomenon called zoo babies. Each spring, interstate signs and TV commercials featured photos of blue-eyed, squealing balls of fuzz debuting at major zoos around the country, an irresistible marketing lure for families that turned out to snap photos and cuddle the newest arrivals. Zoo babies were among the industry’s number one moneymaking programs, and tigers were always the biggest draw. As an added bonus, zoos advertised these activities under the guise of conservation. “You’d get your T-shirt, get your picture taken, and you’d walk away feeling like you’ve saved the world — you’ve saved tigers,” Harrison said.

But there was a problem, and Harrison, who worked as an exotic animal veterinary assistant as a teenager in Ohio, noticed it. There were lots of zoo babies but no zoo adolescents. When Harrison eventually began asking the staff about what had happened to last year’s tiger cubs, he’d get vague answers about the animals being traded off to different zoos. To Harrison, that math didn’t add up: Even the largest zoos around the country had only two or three adult tigers. But zoos annually paraded hundreds of babies out for pictures and play sessions.

Jack Hanna holds two Bengal Tiger cubs that were born and bred in captivity during a groundbreaking ceremony at the Dallas Zoo in 1998. (AP Photo/Tim Sharp)

Harrison eventually learned the dark truth: After the cubs reached a certain age they became “zoo surplus” and were sold at exotic animal auctions to private buyers. These auctions were raucous events, attended mostly by veteran wildlife keepers and professional breeders that zoos relied on to supply their collections. Harrison attended a few and noticed the same employees who weeks earlier had been talking up the conservation value of the zoo’s tiger babies, holding cub after cub up by their armpits to sell to the highest buyer. The whole scene was commonplace at the time. “No one thought anything of it,” Harrison said.

The zoo baby phenomenon led to a surge in private big cat ownership. In the 1990s, according to Harrison, wildlife-related television spread the idea of owning a pet tiger to a much wider audience. Jack Hanna types bottle-fed cubs and paraded tigers on leashes on talk shows. The predators appeared no more dangerous than a golden retriever. “It was like somebody flipped a switch on,” Harrison said. At the time, Harrison was the lone police officer in Ohio who could handle big cat emergencies; he suddenly went from getting a couple calls a year to getting more than 100. After removing an unruly pet from someone’s property, he’d ask people why they thought it was a good idea to own a lion or tiger. Many responded it was because they’d seen it on TV. Harrison started calling it the Steve Irwin syndrome.

That turns out to be an apt diagnosis. According to research conducted by scientists at Duke University, seeing a wild animal in an unnatural, human setting — a chimpanzee drinking out of a baby bottle or sitting through a talk show interview — makes people less likely to donate to a conservation organization that aids that species and more likely to think the creature in question would make a great pet. According to Kara Walker, now a behavioral ecologist at North Carolina State University and lead author of the research, published in 2011 in the journal PLOS One, this also extends to people’s thought process after an encounter with a cub, which might go something like: Look at this cuddly tiger! I got to pet it for 20 minutes and it licked my hand and now I can have a tiger, too!

Enterprising private exotic animal owners capitalized on the moment. They realized they could make a killing holding their own cub petting events at malls, fairs, and roadside zoos, which compounded an already vicious breeding pattern. “I call it the breed and dump cycle,” said Nasser, the Michigan State law professor. That cycle is largely responsible for the proliferation of tigers throughout the U.S., and by the middle of the last decade, the most notorious of all the breed-and-dump outfits belonged to Joe Exotic.

But cub-petting events weren’t enough for Joe. Concerned with fame and fortune, he plotted ways to grow his online following and commercialize the business. He started selling Tiger King–branded candy, apparel, and condoms. He also kept zoo costs down by euthanizing sterile or defective tigers and turned donated animals that weren’t moneymakers — especially emus — into cat food. During regular inspections of Joe’s zoo, the USDA cited hundreds of American Welfare Act violations. The agency conducted four investigations, including one that looked into the deaths of 23 tiger cubs from 2009 to 2010. (As an endangered species, tigers cannot be killed unless there is a legitimate reason, such as ending the life of a sick tiger.) Animal rights groups such as PETA conducted their own covert investigations, revealing what they claimed was gross abuse — dead and dying animals, extremely crowded cages lacking basic necessities such as water, and untrained staff who routinely abused animals. In retaliation, Joe launched social media attacks and filed dozens of contrived police reports claiming his accusers were the ones who were breaking the law.

For years, Joe’s strategy worked: Profit off cubs. Evade his enemies. Skirt the law. It probably would’ve continued to work had Joe’s path not collided, as he once put it, with “some bitch down there in Florida.”

* * *

Carole Baskin in 2017 walking the property at Big Cat Rescue, a nonprofit sanctuary committed to humane treatment of rescued animals, often coming from exploitive for-profit operations. (Loren Elliott/Tampa Bay Times via AP)

Vultures circle overhead as Carole Baskin and I make our way along a secluded stretch of the Upper Tampa Bay Trail, about 15 miles outside of downtown Tampa. A spring breeze flutters her waist-length blond hair and blows through the thick surrounding brush of oaks and palmettos. Despite the blue sky and sunshine, the trail is empty. The only sound is the rustle of leaves and crunch of Baskin’s leopard-print boots on the pavement. It was this trail, Baskin explained to me, on which she regularly bikes to work, that a hitman had identified as a place to take her out.

Baskin is arguably the most well-known activist in the country campaigning against big cat ownership. She also takes in unwanted exotic cats at Big Cat Rescue, her sanctuary in Tampa, which currently houses 66 cats belonging to 11 different species. It’s one of the few places in the U.S. capable of providing these animals with a safe, reasonably good life in captivity.

Like Harrison, Baskin used to be part of the problem. A pivot from big cat owner to big cat conservationist is a common story among advocates in the field. Baskin stumbled into owning an exotic cat in the early 1990s at the age of 31. She and her ex-husband, Don, worked together in the real estate business. They used llamas to mitigate the brush on the Florida properties they sold, and the easiest place to get a llama was at an exotic animal auction. At one memorable event, a man seated next to Baskin bid on a baby bobcat. Baskin couldn’t help but lean over and whisper: “When that cat grows up, she is going to tear your face off.”

“I’m a taxidermist,” the man replied. “I’m just gonna club her in the head in the parking lot and make her into a den ornament.”

Baskin was horrified. Don outbid the man and they brought home the 6-month-old kitten, which Baskin named Windsong. As Windsong grew, the bobcat terrorized Baskin’s daughter and the family’s German shepherd. The solution, Baskin decided, was to get Windsong a playmate. Don found a guy in Minnesota who agreed to sell them a bobcat kitten. Turned out, the man was a fur farmer; Baskin and Don came back from that trip with 56 bobcat and lynx kittens — everything the farmer had for sale. The following year, they returned to rescue the 28 adult cats, too.

With their home overrun by exotic cats, Baskin and Don transformed a nearby 40-acre property they owned into a sanctuary, albeit with misguided tourism and breeding components. They called it Wildlife on Easy Street. They amassed a collection of at least 150 exotic cats of 17 species. For $75 a night, visitors could share a small cabin with a bobcat, cougar, or serval. Baskin started breeding half a dozen big cat species, including ocelots and leopards. Pre-internet, all Baskin’s information came from breeders and dealers, who had their own motivations. “They were saying, ‘Oh, you should breed these animals because they’re endangered and the zoos don’t know what they’re doing and they’re going to disappear from the wild,’” Baskin said. “So, we thought, well, that’s something we could definitely do to help save the cats.”

But people who bought kittens from Baskin often returned the cats after they grew up. Once, a Siberian lynx — an animal Baskin swore she recognized from when it was young — showed up at auctions. People started donating cats to Baskin’s sanctuary by the dozens. Some years, she turned away hundreds of animals due to a lack of space. Around the same time, Baskin started attending conferences held by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, where she learned a few hard truths. None of these cats had any conservation value for their species. In fact, Baskin realized big cats had no business being bred and kept as pets at all.

In 1997, Baskin pulled a 180. She stopped breeding and began spaying and neutering all of her animals. She started enforcing a new rule in 2003: Big Cat Rescue, her rebranded sanctuary, would take any unwanted tiger, lion, savannah, or whatever else, but in return the owner had to sign a contract forfeiting their right to own a big cat. “We’re the only place that absolutely insists that if you’re going to dump an animal here, you are never going to own another exotic cat,” Baskin said.

The contracts were a good start, but Carole had an even bigger goal in mind: ending all big cat ownership. Critical to realizing that vision is Howard Baskin, a businessman from Poughkeepsie, New York, who Carole met at an event at the Florida aquarium in 2002. (Baskin’s previous husband walked out the door one day and was never seen or heard from again — though she was questioned, no evidence was ever found linking Baskin to his disappearance.) A lifelong bachelor with a Harvard MBA and a law degree from the University of Miami, Howard appears in many ways Carole’s opposite. Carole dresses like a Woodstock attendee and carries herself with the breezy grace of a dancer. Howard trundles along, turtle-like, in dad-style khakis with a cell phone holster. But they make a good team. Howard handles the administrative and legal duties and Carole focuses on advocacy. “On our honeymoon, we wrote a 25-year plan to stop the big cat abuses that bad guys hold dear,” Carole said.

Carole and Howard started by setting up a Google alert for cub-petting events around the country. Baskin would email the venues explaining the downsides of cub petting and asking them to cancel the event, and if they did not respond, she would then direct her hundreds of thousands of social media followers to flood the venues with emails explaining the downsides of cub petting. One by one, malls began to call off the events. (Fairs proved more impervious to the bad PR.) Baskin homed in on the primary players in the exotic cat world and publicized her findings on 911animalabuse.com, a website she created. One individual stood out among all the breeders: a guy with a dozen different aliases, but whose cub petting photos always included the same motley group of heavily tattooed, pierced, longhaired workers. It was Joe Exotic’s crew.

* * *

Joseph Maldonado in 2013, answering a question during an interview at the zoo he then ran in Wynnewood, Oklahoma. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)

As Baskin ramped up her efforts, Joe’s profits plummeted. In retaliation, he launched a smear campaign against Baskin’s nonprofit. He renamed his cub-petting show Big Cat Rescue Entertainment and designed a near-identical copy of Baskin’s Big Cat Rescue logo. The Baskins sued Joe in 2011 for copyright infringement. Joe countersued, but those claims were tossed out by a judge. Joe eventually agreed to a consent judgement north of $1 million, which he had no intention of paying. He did everything he could to obscure his money, changing the name of his zoo and transferring assets to an account in his mother’s name. Joe also made a series of increasingly unhinged videos posted on social media threatening Baskin’s life. One featured an effigy of Baskin. Another depicted Baskin’s head in a jar, Silence of the Lambs–style.

In 2015, Baskin got a call from a woman who said Joe had inquired with her then-husband, who she said was a former military sharpshooter, about hiring her husband to kill Baskin. Nearly two years later, Baskin received a similar warning from a woman named Ashley Webster, an aspiring wildlife biologist from Colorado who had just started working at Joe’s park. In a deposition, Webster recalled Joe saying “something along the lines of he’d give me a few thousand dollars to go to Florida and put a bullet in [Baskin’s] head.” Carole and Howard reported the incidents to police, but nothing seemed to come of it.

Unbeknownst to the Baskins, the FWS had launched an investigation of Joe and his zoo in 2016 for potential animal trafficking violations. The saga, which has been detailed at length in various news reports, involved an FWS agent convincing a man named James Garretson, who’d done big cat business with Joe in the past, to become a government informant. Garretson agreed to attempt to arrange a meeting between Joe and an undercover FBI agent posing as a hitman. At the outset, what the feds learned was that Joe already had his own scheme in the works: He planned to hire Allen Glover, a man from South Carolina who’d been convicted of assault, for the job.

Glover was a longtime associate of a man named Jeff Lowe, who’d done business with Joe and shortly after started hanging around the Tiger King and his world. Joe, who was under the impression that Lowe was wealthy, made his new friend the co-owner of the zoo’s land, along with his mother. In exchange, Lowe, according to a deposition, said he would pay a portion of Joe’s mounting bills at the zoo and let Joe run the park as usual. “The whole thing was to put the zoo in his name so Carole couldn’t get it,” Joe told me. But Lowe had other plans. In a May 2018 deposition, Lowe admitted that he was interested in the zoo for himself.

According to Glover, who testified at Joe’s trial, he and Joe settled on a $5,000 down payment for the hit on Baskin and discussed other details such as what weapon to use. Glover said that Joe eventually gave him $3,000 cash and a cell phone loaded with pictures of Baskin. But during his two days on the stand, Glover claimed he’d always intended to take the money and run. For his part, Joe denies giving Glover the phone, and said that Lowe was the one who instructed him to pay Glover. (Lowe declined multiple interview requests for this story.) Glover did travel east, but in court he said he only made it as far as an unknown beach in Florida, where he partied most of the money away in a single night. Glover claimed that it was not his intention to kill Baskin in Florida, but rather to warn her that Joe wanted her dead.

Meanwhile, in December 2017, Joe agreed to Garretson’s proposed meeting with the undercover FBI agent. The agent quoted Joe a $10,000 fee for the hit. The two agreed to a rough outline of a deal, but Joe never followed through. Instead, in June, without notice, Joe and his new husband, Dillon Passage, loaded up four dogs, two baby tigers, and a baby white camel, and took off. (Joe’s previous husband, Travis Maldonado, accidentally shot and killed himself in October 2017.) “Joe Exotic, as far as I was concerned, was dead,” Joe told me. He was going to create a new life with Passage.

Joe and Passage left Oklahoma and headed east, eventually landing in Gulf Breeze, Florida. On a sunny September morning, Joe pulled up to the local hospital. He planned to walk in and apply for a job. Instead, unmarked cars surrounded him. U.S. marshals jumped out, guns pointed, yelling at Joe to get on the ground.

Lowe had indeed been working with federal agents since as early as June. Less than a month before Joe’s arrest, Lowe bragged on Facebook that he’d been “setting [Joe’s] ass up for almost a year.” And it seems Lowe got what he wanted. He and his wife, Lauren, now run Joe’s old zoo, where they continue to churn out cubs for playtimes. The nursery lineup recently featured Nova, the rambunctious tiliger who bit my producer.

Jeff Lowe and Lauren Dropla with Faith the liliger at their home in 2016 inside the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Wynnewood, Oklahoma. (Ruaridh Connellan/BarcroftImages / Barcroft Media via Getty Images)

* * *

This past March, journalists from around the country descended on downtown Oklahoma City for Joe Exotic’s trial. Garretson and Glover testified against Joe. Joe’s ex-boyfriend John Finlay testified too. Joe took the stand at the end of the seven-day affair. He said he never intended for anyone to kill Carole Baskin and claimed to have known that Garretson, Glover, and Lowe were conspiring to take him down. He said he played along to better understand their plan and gather evidence he could use against them. The jury deliberated for less than three hours, then found Joe guilty on all charges, including illegally killing five tigers and illegally transporting endangered species across state lines. In January, a judge sentenced Joe to 22 years in federal prison. In a Facebook post, Joe maintained his innocence and said he plans to appeal.

Nasser hopes that Joe’s conviction triggers the beginning of what she calls “a long-overdue Blackfish moment for captive tigers,” referring to the popular documentary that exposed problems with the sea-park business’ treatment of orcas and led to numerous SeaWorld boycotts. Pending any appeals, the Baskins and other activists believe the Tiger King’s downfall could topple the industry. They hope to use the momentum and notoriety of Joe’s case to usher in sweeping legal reform of big cat ownership in the U.S.

Baskin has been pushing for this type of reform since 1998, when she began working on what’s called the Captive Wildlife Safety Act, a federal bill unanimously voted into law in 2003 that barred the sale of big cats as pets across state lines. Loopholes in the law, however, have rendered it largely ineffective. She and Howard — along with major nonprofit groups such as the Humane Society and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) — have been pushing a new bill, the Big Cat Public Safety Act. First introduced in 2012, the legislation would ban all public contact with big cats, including cub petting, and would require all big cat owners to register their animals. Howard hired a top Republican lobbying firm in 2014 to work with Harrison to champion the bill — not for its conservation clou, but on its pubic safety merits. Senator Susan Collins signed on to the bill last November, the first republican cosponsor. Three other Republican senators, including Richard Burr of North Carolina, have since joined Collins. The registrations would provide officials with valuable insight into who owns what and where — potentially life-saving information in the event of, say, a tornado blowing through a tiger park. The ban on cub petting, though, is the most important part of the bill, as proponents believe it would disincentivize the breeding of big cats.

Last year, the bill made it out of the Committee on Natural Resources in a bipartisan vote and could soon head to the House floor, where it has broad support. “Law enforcement has enough problems trying to protect the public without having to run into a house where there might be a tiger,” said Harrison. Dozens of Republican lawmakers support it — a party full of politicians, who, Harrison said, for the most part “don’t give a crap about cats.”

For now, though, cub petting remains a lucrative industry. According to data compiled by a team of New York University researchers in 2016, at least 77 facilities across the country allowed interactions with exotic animals (about a quarter of those were with big cats). In a follow-up study in 2019, which focused specifically on tiger petting, those same zoos were still open. One operation in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, run by Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, charges up to $339 per person for tours and cub-petting sessions. Supporters of the Big Cat Public Safety Act believe that ending cub petting would go a long way toward stopping the trade of big cats altogether. “Without ending public contact, you’re not going to have sufficient incentive for all the fly-by-night exhibitors to stop breeding,” said Nasser.

The new protections would extend to smaller species such as jaguars and even unnatural hybrids like Nova. They’d also apply to accredited zoos. While the zoo baby phenomenon is no longer as rabid as it once was, not all zoos have ended the practice of animal meet-and-greets. The Nashville Zoo provides clouded leopard cubs for zoo fundraisers and media events (zoo officials say that play and petting sessions are not allowed), and the Dallas Zoo recently held a cheetah photo op session for the Dallas Stars (zoo officials point out none of the Stars were able to pet the cheetah, however).

Limiting and eventually banning big cat ownership in the U.S. would almost certainly be a boon for the species worldwide. Fewer than 4,000 tigers survive in the wild today. But they are farmed by the thousands in China, Laos, and other Southeast Asian countries where big cat parts are sought after as erroneous medicinal remedies and status-touting commodities. Tiger bone wine, in particular, is considered a cure-all tonic, a virility booster for men, and a coveted, favor-winning gift for superiors, elders, and relatives.

Tiger bone is banned in China, and it’s illegal to trade big cats and their parts in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. But there’s a robust black market for tiger bones, skin, teeth, and claws — and farmed tiger parts keep demand for these items alive, perpetuating poaching. The U.S. government considers closing tiger farms integral to saving wild tigers, but when State Department officials try to negotiate this point with foreign diplomats — especially those from China — they’re often told to clean up their own mess first. “When I talk to government leaders about tiger farming in many of the Asian countries, quite often they ask me, ‘What about tigers in the U.S.? What role do the tigers in private backyards in the U.S. contribute to wild tiger conservation?’” said Grace Ge Gabriel, IFAW’s Asia regional director. “Literally, I am speechless. I don’t have an answer.”

A tiger named Seth rests above a pond at Big Cat Rescue in 2017. (Loren Elliott/Tampa Bay Times via AP)

* * *

After I first contacted Joe following his trial, we spoke several times over the next few months. He liked to talk, only cutting off our calls if another person in the prison needed to use the phone. Joe never admitted any wrongdoing when it came to Baskin; rather, he was eager to defend his innocence. Multiple times he told me, “That whole mess was nothing but a setup.”

Joe did cop to something else, though. He said being locked up in jail had made him realize he’d mistreated the animals all those years, depriving them of their freedom and robbing them of their dignity by keeping them behind bars. Joe told me he regretted having done that. “Now that I have nothing to do besides sit in a cell with no TV, no radio, no nothing, I know exactly what I did to those [animals],” he said. “We can all be drove crazy by doing nothing.”

To make amends, Joe told me he plans to create a new zoo when he gets out. This one without any cages. Just tigers roaming free.

* * *

You can listen to our four-part “Cat People” podcast series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Rachel Nuwer is an award-winning freelance journalist who reports about science, travel, food and adventure for the New York Times, National Geographic, BBC Future and more. Her multi-award winning first book, Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking, was published in September 2018 with Da Capo Press.

Editors: Mike Dang and Chris Outcalt Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross

[kristablogs]

Protecting nature could prevent the next pandemic

Deforestation is both an environmental and a health hazard. (Ales Krivec/Unsplash/)

Follow all of PopSci’s COVID-19 coverage here, including tips on cleaning groceries, ways to tell if your symptoms are just allergies, and a tutorial on making your own mask.

Our current pandemic likely originated in bats. One of these flying mammals somehow came into close contact with a human, or infected another animal which in turn spread the disease to people. But this isn’t the first or the last time a pathogen will creep over from an animal and into humans. The CDC estimates that 6 in every 10 new diseases originate in animals, and those of concern in the US include coronaviruses, West Nile, rabies, and Lyme. Other so-called zoonotic viruses include MERS, SARS, H1N1, and HIV.

As humans and wildlife increasingly intermingle due to wildlife trade and deforestation, these types of viruses will only have more opportunity to infect homo sapien hosts. “We know there’s another load of them out there,” says Andrew Dobson, an infectious disease ecologist at Princeton University. “Being prepared and stopping them before they cross over is the most cost-effective way of preventing this from happening again.”

Dobson and an interdisciplinary team including biologists, economists, and epidemiologists recently published a policy paper in Science demonstrating the need to prepare for all the nefarious microbes lurking in wildlife. Not only will investing in conservation and regulating wildlife trade stem the flow of pathogens, it’s on the order of 1,000 times more cost-effective than dealing with pandemics after they hit humanity.

Zoonotic diseases infect people during close contact with wildlife, with livestock sometimes serving as an intermediate vector. Deforestation increases this risk. When we increasingly carve up forests with roads and settlements, we also reduce habitat for wildlife, making humans and animals more likely to interact. Roughly half of zoonotic diseases are related to deforestation, with Ebola being just one example.

Wildlife trade for everything from food to medicine to exotic pets also encourages the emergence of new diseases. Globally, countless animals are captured and transported without health screenings and kept in unsanitary conditions as part of the multibillion dollar industry. While some consumption of wild animals is part of cultural traditions, Dobson says that a lot of it is also related to the desire for luxury dining. The sprawling exotic pet industry, of which the United States is a big player, also contributes.

With the COVID-19 pandemic raging, the team of scientists prepared an economic analysis to see how much it might cost to stop zoonoses at their source. Using their expertise and existing information on policies to address deforestation and wildlife trade, the researchers assembled a global estimate of what it might cost to stave off pandemics. For comparison, they estimated the toll, in dollars, that the current pandemic might inflict.

In total, preventing future pandemics through strategic protection of forests and regulating wildlife trade would cost between $22 and $31 billion a year. This might seem like a lot, but it’s pennies compared to the cost of fighting a global disease outbreak. Pandemic-caused economic losses for 2020 will be at least $5 trillion, the researchers report. Including a value for the lost lives, the projected impacts of COVID-19 soar up to between $8 and $15 trillion dollars. Just as a reminder, a trillion is one thousand billions. So it’s not a stretch to say that the prevention measures outlined by the authors are pocket change in comparison. “Dollars talk,” says Amy Ando, a coauthor of the study and environmental economist at the University of Illinois. “Perhaps [the findings] will help policymakers and legislators to have a better way to compare the bottom line.”

Christina Faust, an infectious disease ecologist who wasn’t part of the study, adds that a component of prevention needs to be reducing barriers to conducting research in the origin countries of outbreaks. “We need to do better to promote ongoing research in affected countries and help make conducting this important research more economical,” she said in an email. “Reducing deforestation and limiting wildlife trade would significantly reduce risks of new emerging diseases and, if stakeholders are involved throughout the process, could have cascading benefits beyond global health.”

Preventative efforts would need to take place at all levels of governance. One first step would perhaps be to increase funding for the Convention on International in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES), a treaty to regulate wildlife trade. “CITES is massively underfunded,” says Dobson. “So empowering CITES or bringing in additional expertise that deals with monitoring the health and pathogens in those species that are traded is a vital way to go.”

Dobson also envisions funding for expanded “genetic libraries” of novel viruses. Researchers involved in monitoring animal health could keep samples of pathogenic DNA, allowing us to have the tools to quickly develop tests and vaccines should any of those bugs jump to humans.

To help reduce deforestation-related risks, ecologists could target areas where high-risk species—including bats, rodents, primates, and pangolins—dwell alongside humans, and policymakers could target conservation efforts in those areas. Myriad policy options exist, like direct payments to farmers and loggers to compensate for lost income, as well as forest regulation and zoning to avoid disturbing areas most likely to harbor potentially harmful microbes.

Ando adds that there are a number of side benefits to avoiding deforestation. When the researchers considered the value of carbon sequestration provided by leaving trees alone, the cost of preventing pandemics went down by $4 billion per year. Pandemic prevention can also create new jobs in conservation, research, and veterinary medicine.

It’s a problem not unlike climate change. We’ve pushed off implementing such pandemic prevention measures so far because “we tend to focus on the problems right in front of us,” says Ando. Perhaps, the researchers hope, showing the massive costs we can avert will persuade policymakers to see the long view.

[scootoaster]

Protecting nature could prevent the next pandemic

Deforestation is both an environmental and a health hazard. (Ales Krivec/Unsplash/)

Follow all of PopSci’s COVID-19 coverage here, including tips on cleaning groceries, ways to tell if your symptoms are just allergies, and a tutorial on making your own mask.

Our current pandemic likely originated in bats. One of these flying mammals somehow came into close contact with a human, or infected another animal which in turn spread the disease to people. But this isn’t the first or the last time a pathogen will creep over from an animal and into humans. The CDC estimates that 6 in every 10 new diseases originate in animals, and those of concern in the US include coronaviruses, West Nile, rabies, and Lyme. Other so-called zoonotic viruses include MERS, SARS, H1N1, and HIV.

As humans and wildlife increasingly intermingle due to wildlife trade and deforestation, these types of viruses will only have more opportunity to infect homo sapien hosts. “We know there’s another load of them out there,” says Andrew Dobson, an infectious disease ecologist at Princeton University. “Being prepared and stopping them before they cross over is the most cost-effective way of preventing this from happening again.”

Dobson and an interdisciplinary team including biologists, economists, and epidemiologists recently published a policy paper in Science demonstrating the need to prepare for all the nefarious microbes lurking in wildlife. Not only will investing in conservation and regulating wildlife trade stem the flow of pathogens, it’s on the order of 1,000 times more cost-effective than dealing with pandemics after they hit humanity.

Zoonotic diseases infect people during close contact with wildlife, with livestock sometimes serving as an intermediate vector. Deforestation increases this risk. When we increasingly carve up forests with roads and settlements, we also reduce habitat for wildlife, making humans and animals more likely to interact. Roughly half of zoonotic diseases are related to deforestation, with Ebola being just one example.

Wildlife trade for everything from food to medicine to exotic pets also encourages the emergence of new diseases. Globally, countless animals are captured and transported without health screenings and kept in unsanitary conditions as part of the multibillion dollar industry. While some consumption of wild animals is part of cultural traditions, Dobson says that a lot of it is also related to the desire for luxury dining. The sprawling exotic pet industry, of which the United States is a big player, also contributes.

With the COVID-19 pandemic raging, the team of scientists prepared an economic analysis to see how much it might cost to stop zoonoses at their source. Using their expertise and existing information on policies to address deforestation and wildlife trade, the researchers assembled a global estimate of what it might cost to stave off pandemics. For comparison, they estimated the toll, in dollars, that the current pandemic might inflict.

In total, preventing future pandemics through strategic protection of forests and regulating wildlife trade would cost between $22 and $31 billion a year. This might seem like a lot, but it’s pennies compared to the cost of fighting a global disease outbreak. Pandemic-caused economic losses for 2020 will be at least $5 trillion, the researchers report. Including a value for the lost lives, the projected impacts of COVID-19 soar up to between $8 and $15 trillion dollars. Just as a reminder, a trillion is one thousand billions. So it’s not a stretch to say that the prevention measures outlined by the authors are pocket change in comparison. “Dollars talk,” says Amy Ando, a coauthor of the study and environmental economist at the University of Illinois. “Perhaps [the findings] will help policymakers and legislators to have a better way to compare the bottom line.”

Christina Faust, an infectious disease ecologist who wasn’t part of the study, adds that a component of prevention needs to be reducing barriers to conducting research in the origin countries of outbreaks. “We need to do better to promote ongoing research in affected countries and help make conducting this important research more economical,” she said in an email. “Reducing deforestation and limiting wildlife trade would significantly reduce risks of new emerging diseases and, if stakeholders are involved throughout the process, could have cascading benefits beyond global health.”

Preventative efforts would need to take place at all levels of governance. One first step would perhaps be to increase funding for the Convention on International in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES), a treaty to regulate wildlife trade. “CITES is massively underfunded,” says Dobson. “So empowering CITES or bringing in additional expertise that deals with monitoring the health and pathogens in those species that are traded is a vital way to go.”

Dobson also envisions funding for expanded “genetic libraries” of novel viruses. Researchers involved in monitoring animal health could keep samples of pathogenic DNA, allowing us to have the tools to quickly develop tests and vaccines should any of those bugs jump to humans.

To help reduce deforestation-related risks, ecologists could target areas where high-risk species—including bats, rodents, primates, and pangolins—dwell alongside humans, and policymakers could target conservation efforts in those areas. Myriad policy options exist, like direct payments to farmers and loggers to compensate for lost income, as well as forest regulation and zoning to avoid disturbing areas most likely to harbor potentially harmful microbes.

Ando adds that there are a number of side benefits to avoiding deforestation. When the researchers considered the value of carbon sequestration provided by leaving trees alone, the cost of preventing pandemics went down by $4 billion per year. Pandemic prevention can also create new jobs in conservation, research, and veterinary medicine.

It’s a problem not unlike climate change. We’ve pushed off implementing such pandemic prevention measures so far because “we tend to focus on the problems right in front of us,” says Ando. Perhaps, the researchers hope, showing the massive costs we can avert will persuade policymakers to see the long view.

[scienceblogtumbler]

Scientists track the link between wildlife and COVID-19

On the eve of Earth Day, it is a good time to ask if our treatment of animals has contributed to the pandemics that impact people around the globe. (Illustration/iStock)

As the world reels under the coronavirus crisis on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, might nature be trying to tell us something?

USC scientists say the COVID-19 pandemic and additional outbreaks over the last decade are linked to wildlife. Paula Cannon, Distinguished Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, specializes in how viruses are transmitted. She said it’s likely the coronavirus responsible for the ongoing pandemic originated with wildlife and then infected people.

“We are being reminded by nature that we are playing Russian roulette with the viruses out there,” Cannon said. “Humans are increasing the odds of disease happening as we move into wild areas and catch wild animals. We created the circumstances where it was only a matter of time until something like this happens, and it will only be a matter of time before it happens again.”

We are being reminded by nature that we are playing Russian roulette with the viruses out there.

Paula Cannon

Scientists are not certain how this latest outbreak began and spread, but they believe the coronavirus likely originated in populations of horseshoe bats. Cannon said there’s strong evidence for this hypothesis and it’s the best explanation at present.

They pinpointed a marketplace in Wuhan, China, as the epicenter for the outbreak, where the virus may have first infected humans and then spread around the world.

While the market has been identified as a seafood market, live animals were also sold there — some as pets or for food. This close proximity with infected animals enabled the virus’s transmission to humans.

Similar outbreaks have occurred before, such as with the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) several years ago. Evidence suggests that MERS spread from bats to camels to people, while SARS likely occurred as a result of transmission from bats to civet cats to humans, Cannon said. Bats are also believed to be the original source of Ebola virus outbreaks that infected people in Africa from 2014 to 2016, and in 1976.

Scientists have found very strong genetic clues that COVID-19 originated with bats. Cannon said that’s because part of the coronavirus’s genetic code looks very similar to viruses found in bats. There’s also a signature resembling pangolin viruses, but whether pangolins had a direct role in transmission or were also victims of transmission from bats is unclear.

“There are hundreds of coronaviruses, and a large number of them are found in bats,” Cannon said. “Based on what happened previously with SARS and MERS and now COVID-19, scientists are very concerned that other viruses will one day make the jump from bats to humans. It may be once in 100 years that the alchemy is right to infect humans, but when it does, it takes off like wildfire.”

How wildlife trafficking could have contributed to COVID-19

Protecting human health and wildlife may depend on technology solutions, such as artificial intelligence. One USC researcher is wielding AI to curb wildlife trafficking — a practice that enables animal disease outbreaks to spread to people.

Bistra Dilkina, professor of computer science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, says that wildlife trafficking is a big problem. The trade is estimated to be a $5 billion to $23 billion annual business as animals are sold as pets, for their skins, or to be made into food and medicine. Apes, for instance, have been turned into bushmeat. Tigers have been sold as pets or for their skins and pangolins for their scales, as have bats, snakes, elephants, rhinoceros and exotic birds, she said.

Wildlife trafficking relies on local and transnational illegal supply networks. It degrades environmental and cultural resources, converges with other serious crimes, is linked to violence against both animals and humans, facilitates zoonotic diseases like coronaviruses that can infect many species and undermines sustainable development investments.

While people might not have paid much attention to wildlife trading, you can see the role it plays in disease transmission.

Bistra Dilkina

USC has launched a project targeting wildlife trafficking routes using AI. It uses data for models and algorithms to understand the supply chains of wildlife trafficking, to predict likely trafficking nodes and routes, and to decide where to interdict and deploy law enforcement in order to minimize the effectiveness and resilience of these illicit supply networks.

“AI can be used to make predictive models to locate hot spots of wildlife poaching and guide ranger patrols more effectively to stop poachers and save animals. This has been field tested to good effect in several protected areas in Cambodia and Africa,” she said.

The project involves several experts in supply chain management, criminology, operations research and computer science from several institutions, including Michigan State and other universities. It is funded by the National Science Foundation.

There are other benefits, too.

“Wildlife trade often involves other contraband, so there’s a co-benefit to disrupting drug trafficking, for example,” Dilkina said. “Also, while people might not have paid much attention to wildlife trading, you can see the role it plays in disease transmission, and that it potentially affects everything as COVID-19 has turned the world upside down.”

source https://scienceblog.com/515707/scientists-track-the-link-between-wildlife-and-covid-19/

[biofunmy]

China Identifies New Virus Causing Pneumonia-Like Illness

HONG KONG — Chinese researchers say they have identified a new virus behind an illness that has infected dozens of people across Asia, setting off fears in a region that was struck by a deadly epidemic 17 years ago.

There is no evidence that the new virus is readily spread by humans, which would make it particularly dangerous, and it has not been tied to any deaths. But health officials in China and elsewhere are watching it carefully to ensure that the outbreak does not develop into something more severe.

Researchers in China have “initially identified” the new virus, a coronavirus, as the pathogen behind a mysterious, pneumonialike illness that has sickened 59 people in the city of Wuhan and caused a panic in the central Chinese region, the state broadcaster, China Central Television, said on Thursday. They detected this virus in 15 of the people who fell ill, the report said.

The new coronavirus “is different from previous human coronaviruses that were previously discovered, and more scientific research is needed for further understanding,” the report said.

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that infect animals and people. Some cause only the symptoms known as the common cold, although many other viruses also do that.

The announcement signals that researchers are making progress in containing the outbreak, but Asian officials are not likely to relax their vigilance until they learn more. The disease has evoked memories of the outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, in 2003. SARS, a respiratory disease and also a coronavirus, spread from southern China in 2003 and infected more than 3,000 people, killing 774.

China initially covered up the extent of the SARS outbreak and was criticized by health officials around the world for doing so. On Thursday, the World Health Organization praised the Chinese response to the new outbreak and said it did not recommend any restrictions on trade or travel to China because of the virus.

“Preliminary identification of a novel virus in a short period of time is a notable achievement and demonstrates China’s increased capacity to manage new outbreaks,” Dr. Gauden Galea, the W.H.O.’s representative to China, said in a statement.

Many questions about the new virus remain. While it appears to be transmitted to humans via animals, the Chinese government has not said which animals, nor has it disclosed other details about the outbreak, like the transmission route, the incubation period or the ages and genders of the patients.

“So, there are still a lot of question marks,” said David Hui, an expert in emerging infections at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The authorities in Wuhan are still closely monitoring 163 people who were in close contact with the patients, Dr. Hui said. He added that 15 days, the minimum incubation period for some viral infections, had not yet passed since the last reported instance of the disease, on Dec. 29.

“It’s premature to say that there’s no human-to-human transmission,” Dr. Hui said.

The Wuhan government confirmed on Dec. 31 that the health authorities were treating dozens of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause. Symptoms of the new illness include high fever, difficulty breathing and lung lesions, according to the Wuhan health commission. Seven people have become critically ill, the Wuhan authorities have said. On Wednesday, the local health commission said eight people had been discharged.

Researchers have been encouraged by the fact that patients’ relatives and hospital workers have not been reported to have gotten sick, signaling that the virus may not spread easily among humans.

“We can assume that this virus transmissibility is not that high,” said Guan Yi, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Hong Kong, who was part of a team that successfully identified the coronavirus that caused SARS.

Dr. Guan said he was not surprised that the virus identified was a coronavirus, because coronaviruses can pass from animals to humans easily. But he said it would probably be a while before researchers came up with treatments for the illness.

So far, the cases in China have circulated only in Wuhan. The initial cases were linked to workers at a market that sold live fish, animals and birds. Workers disinfected and shut down the market after the city health department said many of the cases had been traced to it.

The new illness appeared just weeks before the Spring Festival, China’s biggest holiday, when hundreds of millions of people travel. The authorities have urged the public to be on alert for pneumonialike symptoms like fevers, body aches and breathing difficulties.

Until Thursday’s announcement, it was not clear what was causing the illnesses in Wuhan. The World Health Organization said Wednesday that it had concluded that it was most likely a coronavirus. “More comprehensive information is required to confirm the pathogen,” the W.H.O. said in a statement.

Early reports on ProMED, a disease-alert service, said there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission.

Last weekend, laboratory tests in China ruled out SARS; the deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS; the flu; bird flu; adenoviruses; and other common pathogens that cause pneumonia.

Health officials in Asia have stepped up screenings and isolated patients with flulike symptoms who had traveled to Wuhan. In Hong Kong, eight people with fever and respiratory symptoms who had recently been in Wuhan were hospitalized on Wednesday.

In South Korea, the authorities said on Wednesday that they had put a Chinese woman under isolated treatment after she was found to have pneumonia after trips to China, including Wuhan.

In Singapore, the authorities placed a Chinese girl with pneumonia in isolation because she had traveled to Wuhan. On Sunday, they said doctors had determined that the child had a common childhood viral illness.

Officials in Hong Kong have installed additional thermal imaging systems at its airport to monitor passengers coming from Wuhan, scanning for people with fevers.

SARS is believed to have jumped to humans from live-animal markets. It was eventually traced to civet cats, raccoon dogs and some other species that were raised and slaughtered for the exotic food trade. The virus normally circulates in bats, and the animals may have gotten it from them, possibly by eating food contaminated by bat droppings.

Most outbreaks of MERS, which appeared in 2012, have been traced to people who raise or sell camels, which in the Middle East are kept for meat, milk, racing, hauling cargo and as pets. Like SARS, MERS can jump from person to person, particularly in hospitals. Some MERS patients infected many others after they were put on machines to help them breathe — the mechanisms helped spew viral particles into the air as they exhaled.

Despite Thursday’s announcement, many Chinese were still expressing fear that there could be a repeat of SARS.

“In fact, what people are more concerned about is the transmission route and whether it can be cured,” wrote a user on Weibo, a popular social media tool in China.

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Sui-Lee Wee reported from Hong Kong and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Elsie Chen contributed research from Beijing.

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