Joe Taft - Tails from the Exotic Feline Rescue Center

Cleo, 2011

TAILS from the EXOTIC FELINE Rescue Center

Kya, 2013

Zeus, 2014

25th Anniversary Edition

Stephen D. McCloud and Joe Taft

Foreword by Bill Nimmo

an imprint of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
BLOOMINGTON & INDIANAPOLIS

This book is a publication of
Quarry Books
an imprint of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

2016 by Joe Taft and Stephen D. McCloud
All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

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Manufactured in China

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-253-02201-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-02411-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02211-0 (ebook)

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Thor and Zeus, October 30, 2011

May the time come when all men will recognize
the fact that the laws of God and humanity
require us to be merciful to the dumb animals, and to
grant the same justice and mercy to them
we would ask for ourselves.

INDIANA AUTHOR Gene Stratton-Porter,
The Strike at Shanes

by Bill Nimmo

Killer, December 23, 2014

In the summer of 1996 my wife and I traveled to southern New Jersey to visit our friends Joan and Jan, who kept a number of tigers on their property: Jaipur, the largest, at seven hundred pounds; Maya, the kindest; and two of the most striking tigers we have ever seen, young brothers Sahib and Sultan. The occasion was the recent birth of three cubs. We spent a memorable day feeding and playing with them and over the next two years made return trips to help out and watch the cubs grow. But as work pressed our time we made fewer and fewer trips and eventually lost touch.

Fifteen years later in June 2011 we received a call saying the tigers were gone, confiscated by the state in 2003 and shipped to an animal sanctuary in Texas. Their removal was brought about by the shooting of a tiger that wandered into the nearby town. Since Great Adventure, an amusement park with tigers, was in the same area, the incident led to an investigation. It was unclear from which facility the tiger escaped, but after six years of legal wrangling and deteriorating conditions at Joans facility the state decided that the tigers must be removed.

All Those TIGERS Are Probably Dead

That phone call prompted our concern about the fate of the tigers we knew as cubs, so we contacted a number of animal welfare organizations. They identified the sanctuary as the Wild Animal Orphanage (WAO) in San Antonio, which had gone bankrupt in 2010, leaving three hundred animals homeless. The information we received was not encouraging. The New Jersey tigers might have been there but identifying a specific tiger would be almost impossible. There are thousands of tigers in this country and their life span is twenty years in the best of conditions; without a proper diet and vet care the probability that they were still alive was remote. The welfare organizations advice was to not bother trying to find them: All those tigers, they told us, are probably dead.

It didnt sound right, or maybe we didnt want to believe it, so I continued to inquire. Then I spoke to Patty Finch, the executive director of the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries. She said that Carole Baskin at Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, Florida, might be able to help.

Armed with a list of the New Jersey tiger names, I went to Florida to meet Carole. She said WAO still had some tigers alive but couldnt be sure about their identities. The only sure way to know was to match the stripe patterns. Every tiger has a unique pattern, so if we had any old pictures they might be able to do something. Fortunately my wife kept pictures of the cubs, so the challenge was to get pictures of the adult tigers at WAO.

Jamie, Caroles daughter, happened to be on her way back to Florida from a rescue out west. Carole rerouted her to San Antonio and made arrangements to get her into WAO. Twenty-four tigers had been transferred there from New Jersey in 2003 and since their arrival many had died and some had gone missing, but seven remained alive. Jamie, along with Mary and Michelle, the only remaining keepers, were able to get pictures of the tigers. Jamie continued on home to Tampa and began the process of stripe matching. One by one the photographs revealed that six of the tigers were an exact match to two litters in the old cub photos. The seventh cat appeared to be younger and probably a cousin.

Getting them released from WAO was complicated by the bankruptcy, but luckily the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) was coordinating the placement of the animals as well as providing food to keep them alive during the process. Gail ABrunzo from IFAW received approval from the judge to release the tigers and I asked Carole if she could take them.

When a sanctuary agrees to take a tiger they are agreeing to provide lifetime care for a cat that eats fifteen pounds of meat a day and requires specialized vet care and its own steel enclosure. Sanctuaries receive no government assistance and rely on donations to survive, so it is an enormous financial commitment for them to take one tiger. Carole agreed to take three. I now had to find a home for the remaining four.

Finding a home for a tiger is not an easy proposition to begin with, and I was warned that the New Jersey tigers would be difficult to place. They were old, very aggressive, and kept in the back of WAO with no exposure to anyone other than their keepers. Private owners or exhibitors would have no interest in these tigers. Zoos would not take them because they were generic (crossbred), and since they were bred in captivity and had no hunting skills they could not be reintroduced into the wild. They were just old tigers that nobody wanted to feed and that had no place to go.

The light in this dark story is that some people do care and have created sanctuaries for big catsall I had to do was find another good one. A report on sanctuaries in the United States lists 130 with tigers. Unfortunately most of them are breeders, dealers, or unaccredited (roadside) zoos advertising themselves as sanctuaries but having no interest in providing lifetime care. To them the tiger is a commodity to be sold or displayed and then dumped when no longer of any commercial value. Only 20 of the 130 could be considered true sanctuaries. The closest one to New York was Carolina Tiger Rescue.