Florida leads the country in the number of breeders and dealers of exotic animals and also leads the nation in the number of killings, maulings and escapes by big cats. It is probably true for other exotic animals as well, but only Big Cat Rescue seems to keep track and their records only reflect exotic cats. The reason Florida is such a haven for this activity is because, unlike other states, Floridians cannot appeal to their legislature to end it.
Back in the 1940’s Florida’s constitution was amended to give the Fish and Game Department, now called the Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission or FWC, absolute authority over all that pertains to wild animals. The legislature only retained the right to set fees and penalties and was precluded from enacting laws to over ride any other aspect of managing wildlife. It was intended to pertain to native wild animals, but didn’t specify that and when keeping wild animals as pets came into vogue, the FWC maintained that they had ultimate authority.
The FWC boasts that they have the most comprehensive set of laws in the country, but based upon the fact that these laws create a haven for breeders, dealers and exotic pet owners, that only goes to show that regulating the industry is not going to stop the problem. The only states who have seen a decline in killings, maulings and escapes are those who ban the trade altogether. In every single case, the numbers dropped to zero or near zero as soon as the laws were passed. Washington state just passed the best laws yet and should be used as a model around the country. What makes their new law the best is that it limits the loop hole that most other states have in allowing anyone with a USDA license to be exempted.
Florida classes wild animals into 4 classes: Class I (incl. lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars, gorillas, bears, etc.), Class II (incl. cougars, servals, bobcats, most monkeys, wolves, etc.) Class III (anything that isn’t Class I or Class II) and venomous snakes is the 4th category. Class I permits requires 1000 hrs experience (which is often falsified because there is no cross check) and costs 150.00 a year and there are 362 people in FL with such licenses. Class II requires 100 hrs experience and costs 150.00 a year and there are roughly 1500 people in FL with this sort of license. Class III requires no experience and in most cases there is no cost involved and there are about 8000 people in FL with this sort of license. You are not allowed to have a Class I animal as a pet, but if you call yourself an Exhibitor, you can have the Class I animal in your back yard or in your house. Cougars are legally kept as pets and can be walked on leashes, taken into schools, flea markets, and driven around town in the car like a dog.
If you have spent any time on the Internet at all, you probably saw photos of the alligator-eating-python in the Everglades. Up until July of 2007, there was no regulation of pythons, boas, nile monitors and many other dangerous reptiles. Big Cat Rescue, the Humane Society of the United States and the Animal Rights Foundation of FL fought for two years to get a bill, called The Python Bill, passed which now requires people to obtain a permit to have such animals. The most important part of the Python Bill was a clause that requires all Class I Exhibitors to post a 10,000.00 bond. The FWC can use the bond money if the person abandons their animals, or if someone gets hurt and the owner won’t stand good for the injury. If the person doesn’t want to post a bond, they can present a bank letter of credit or show that they carry two million in liability insurance, but the latter does not give the FWC any money to care for the animals if they are abandoned. While this was a huge victory this year, it is just a very small step in the right direction.
In 2008 these same groups were working with Rep. Ellen Bogdanoff, the majority whip, to try and stop the flood of exotics into Florida’s ports and to put the power back into the hands of the 17 million Floridians who do not own exotic animals. Animal protection groups are hoping to persuade Florida’s legislators to introduce a joint resolution that amends the constitution to put the decision making authority back into the hands of the legislature so that voters have a voice in Florida’s future. None of the FWC are elected officials and thus do not have to answer to what the public wants. In 2008 the FWC struck down a measure that would require a person moving into a neighborhood with tigers to notify their adjacent neighbors of that fact.
In October of 2007 there were public workshops about these neighbor notification issues but the FWC only seeks input from the industry, not from the public, so Big Cat Rescue sent letters out to all of the neighbors surrounding these exotic owners. The big question on the agenda was: If a tiger gets loose should you have to tell your next door neighbor? As long as none of the neighbors knew about the meeting, the resounding answer would be, “NO.”
Cities and counties should be given the right to enact their own more restrictive rules. The Florida Association of Counties wants the ability to ban these kinds of abusive back yard menageries. Big Cat Rescue is also working to have the cougar re classed from a Class II pet to Class I. That would require the cougar owners to post the 10,000.00 bond which should eliminate a lot of the trade.
On a Federal level the most important big cat bill in 2008 is Haley’s Act HR 1947, a bill to ban contact with big cats and their babies. The main reason so many big cats are bred and discarded is because people make money off letting people pet and pose with babies. Many pseudo sanctuaries breed big cat babies and then charge the public to feed them. If that became illegal, then there would be no reason to breed so many big cats. When this bill passes, it will take care of more than 90% of the problem.
This link is to the 188 pages of rules FL has regarding wildlife: http://myfwc.com/codebook/2006/68A_Freshwater_Fish_and_Wildlife.pdf
Link to permit applications so you can see how little is required: http://myfwc.com/permits/index.html#Wildlife
The following poll shows that 76% of the public would support a ban on all exotic cats as pets:
Would you support a ban on exotic cats as pets?
Answers Votes Percent
Yes………..4418….. 76%
No……….. 1433….. 24%
Public opinion isn’t the only reason why these back yard menageries should be outlawed:
Killings, maulings and escapes: http://www.bigcatrescue.org/big_cat_news.htm
Recent laws to protect big cats: http://www.bigcatrescue.org/lawsbigcatbans.htm
Change is coming.
According to the Internet dictionary, the definition of Critical Mass is: 1. The minimum quantity of fissile material required for a nuclear chain reaction. 2. The minimum amount of people with shared understanding to tip the balance and instigate change.
When a proportionately small fraction of electrons line up in an atom it creates an invisible force that causes all of the other electrons to snap into the same line. When enough people begin to think in certain ways, and reach a critical mass, then all of a sudden all of society begins to align that way. Changes that happen in one place begin to happen all over the world at the same time. Slavery began to be stopped in England in 1807 and around the middle of the 19th century, not only here, but in Asia, Africa and Indonesia because the belief emerged that this was no longer something we could tolerate. It started because one man, William Wilberforce, began to change the way the English viewed slavery and the rest of the world snapped into alignment.
If you saw the movie called Amazing Grace, you may remember that in 1824 William Wilberforce started the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It was the beginning of a change in consciousness toward animals. Up until 1920 women weren’t allowed to vote because they were thought to be irrational creatures and not as intelligent as men. The movement for female equality began in the 1500’s, but it wasn’t until 400 years later that it became law. We are seeing the same changes in attitudes toward the animals.
Big Cats have had big wins in the past couple of years. It began in 2003 with a law to ban the sale of big cats across state lines as pets. It was called the Captive Wild Animal Safety Act and even though it took six years to get it done, the vote was unanimous when it was finally heard. Since then eight states, including AR, IA, IN, KY, LA, MD, NY and WA have banned the keeping of big cats as pets. Three countries including So. Africa, Australia and Ireland and 12 communities in Canada have banned the keeping of big cats as pets. Five countries, including Brazil, Croatia, India, Scotland, the UK and 20 communities in Canada have banned circuses that use big cats in their performances. Five states, including AL, IN, MT, OR and WA have banned killing exotic animals in canned hunts and 27 states, including AL, CA, IA, IL, KY, LA, MD, MS, NH, NJ, NM, OR, RI, SC, TX, WI & WY have banned killing animals over the Internet. Scores of cities and counties have also enacted similar protective measures for the cats and many more have bills that are currently pending.
One definite sign that things are changing is that on May 16 the Chronicles of Narnia, Prince Caspian opens in theaters and not a single display of a baby lion petting booth has been announced. In times past there would have been dozens of baby lions bred to capitalize on such an event; babies that would soon be discarded if they didn’t die from all of the handling. Thanks to the Internet the public and the press are better informed and that means a much more humane world for all of us.
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6 users commented in " Summary of the Big Cat Trade in FL "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThe rules in FL are actually quite strict. You need 1,000 hours experience (no exeption) to possess Class I, and it is for exhibition only (NO PETS). Class II actually require 1,000 hours OR 100 hours and the taking of a test, filling out a husbandry form, 2 letters of recomendation from persons who know you had this experience, & one must be licensed in the state already. Animals must be captive bred from a USDA licensed facility. FWC sets standards for cages depending on the species, items to be included in the cages such as nest boxes/perches, wire/strength construction of cages etc. Owners of Class I & Class II animals are subject to yearly random inspections to keep their permits, as well as class III. And class I exhibitors, although private pet, must meet the same criteria as other USDA facilities/zoos. In order to keep a tiger as a pet (unless grandfathered in) one needs 5 acres of land, a fence with certain hight, a 35 foot buffer from the property line to the cage, plus all other Class I requiremnets. Class II owners require a minimum of I believe 2.25 acres of land. Most homes in big cities don’t have 2.25-5 acres of land so that right there limmits ownership within city limits. These laws don’t look that lenient to me.
If there are really 15,000 persons in FL with class I, II, & III pets the threat to the public is obviously minimal considering only 132 inceidents in OVER TEN YEARS, and many of which were actually just sightings, or escapes where no one in the public was hurt, & include incidents at USDA zoos and other facilities. Even if all 132 incidents occurred in one year it is still less than 1% of owners who had an incident. Compare that to the proportion of attacks/deaths/escapes from domestic pets and you will find that the number of private incidents with their dogs are much greater than that of a captive exotic. Yes there are many more dogs, which is why I say proportions. Do you not think that owners are fully aware of the liabilities involved in keeping a tiger for instance. Of course they are, which is why they take every precaution to keep both their animal and the puclic safe. Hence the extremely LOW percentage of incidents documented, which are FACT, not myth. Deaths or serious injury were even less common among captive exotics and occurred in USDA facilities/zoos/private homes to owners/handlers, NOT the general public. If states would stop banning animals with no grandfather clause the number of animals in santuaries would decrease. The Captive Wildlife Safety Act does not prevent their sale within the state. It prohibits travel between states, so the only thing that bill does is hinder responsible owners from caring for their cat because they can no longer travel for vet care, take their animals with them if a life change requires them to move, or they need to move with them to another state because their city banned them.
FL DOES NOT have a problem with exotic animal bites/attacks and most of this article is just fear mongering. Data should come from the Florida Fish & Wildlife NOT your web site which is anti private ownership. Althoug I must admit since you are only saying 132 cases occured in over ten years it helps our cause because the threat to the public is pretty much non-existant. The MILLIONS of tax payer funds which will be needed to hire persons to monitor a non-existant problem, instead of using it for other needed things such as schools, medical treatment, and living facilities for under privaledged families, is simply a waste of tax payer money.
WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP!
utter nonsense and biased, convoluted logic.
I swear I want to punch someone right in the nose…then sit down and talk civilly about the idiocy of all of this.
Its not right that such a big corporate…yes cooperate in all senses of the word (corrupt, land developing, money grubbing infidels), such as Big Cat Resuce have the networking contacts to raise such noise, when it is the smaller reserves who ARE trying to do the right thing that are only represented by the negative actions of those who aren’t even true to feline conservation.
We at smaller reserves are all NOT backyard numb-skulls owning cats in inappropriate cages, if any cage at all. We are individuals without corperate or large monetary funding, who feel so strongly about feline conservation, that despite overwhelming monetary lacks, little to no source of income other than our own personal budget, devote their LIVES to rescuing the after-effects of greedy cat breeders and selfish cat sellers, and making a life long home of contentment and peace for the mistreated and casually sold animals.
And WE do NOT appreciate being thrown into a catergory with cat sellers and such ilk in this context, or in any of your other biased “down with small reserves!” point of view.
Utter nonsense.
More fear mongering from Baskin, known for attacking smaller sanctuaries and exhibitors. There were 77 people killed last year in Florida in boating accidents. Weigh the statistics. It is illegal to own a big cat as a pet in Florida. These permits are issued only to commercial enterprises, such as her own. Big Cat Rescue is a tourist attraction with 26.000 visitors and a $500,000 profit last year. For this story and much more visit REXANO online and put their name in search.
If Baskin REALLY believes what she says she would euthanize all of her animals and get out of her HUGE MONEY MAKING EXPLOITATION of ANIMALS BUSINESS!!! She herself says how dangerous they are and unsafe to keep in captivity so why then does she have the LARGEST number of cats located in one of the MOST DENSLY POPULATED areas of Tampa. She also conveniently leaves out all remarks of her own injuries and escapes. If she started by “RESCUING” bobcats from a fur farm why then did she take ONLY babies to bottle feed and SELL instead of taking the ADULTS that were ready to be SLAUGHTERED for their fur? Her “change in direction” was merely a change in money making schemes. All of her BELLOWING about exotics in captivity is nothing more than a marketing ploy to bring attention to her facility and personal agenda.
The angry comments against what Carole Baskin does are more appropriate to the situation. Ever since she was outed as a really bad broker of exotic animals she has taken revenge against her former customers this way, by bashing ownership. It’s a shame that she is behaving in a manner that is so far below her intellectual level. She can think and she can write, but she is just plain mean.
TAMPA - Carole Baskin would like to forget that she once bred exotic big cats and sold them as house pets.
She would like everyone else to forget that her husband disappeared mysteriously 10 years ago, leaving her a rich woman.
She would rather that everyone thought of her the way she sees herself: a crusader for animal rights who believes no one should own a wild cat. Not a zoo. Not a sanctuary. Not even herself.
But to many who live and breathe exotic animals, Baskin is a hypocrite.
They point out that her own 40-acre Big Cat Rescue sanctuary in Hillsborough County has 137 tigers, lions, leopards, lynx and other big cats. Her own “private collection,” they call it.
They heckle her at state wildlife meetings. They picket her fundraising Fur Balls. And they speculate on what happened to her late husband, Don Lewis, calling police with tips.
“Did you feed him to the tigers?” someone once asked Baskin at the grocery store. Her own stepdaughter wanted police to test the meat grinder at the sanctuary for her missing father’s DNA.
Baskin says she has no idea what happened to Lewis and she had nothing to do with it. She is simply focused on her mission to outlaw private ownership of big cats and arrive at a day when there is no longer a need to shelter them. A day when Big Cat Rescue closes.
“That’s our ultimate goal: to put ourselves out of business,” she says. For now, her sanctuary for big cats remains one of the largest in Florida. e_SClBBaskin glides quietly between the steel enclosures at her overgrown sanctuary, nodding at the tigers and lions, cougars and leopards that lounge or pace around. Today she keeps her distance. No more “Mommy loves you,” at least not out loud. No more bobcats in her bed.
Instead, she compiles statistics on big cat attacks and writes legislators. She firmly believes that exotic cats should be left to either wax or wane in the wild. People who think they’re preserving the species in captivity (as she once did) are fooling themselves, she says.
“What drives a lot of these people to have these sanctuaries and pseudosanctuaries and backyard collections is that they love being around that kind of animal,” Baskin says, dressed in cheetah print.
Her opinions and actions have inflamed many who love, breed, rescue and rehabilitate exotic animals in Florida. Some have sent out anonymous packets with letters and testimonials, to show Big Cat Rescue is simply a private collection masquerading as a rescue. They sign it “Crusaders for Animals.”
The animosity reached a peak this year after Baskin helped get a liability law passed that would require owners of tigers, chimps and other exotic animals to get insurance in case of injuries.
Baskin also took it upon herself recently to send letters to more than 1,500 people around the state informing them that they live next door to an exotic animal even though state wildlife officials decided against doing so.
The dispute is largely playing out on the Internet and YouTube. Baskin has compiled a wall of shame of animal owners, complete with names, dates and actions on her Big Cat Rescue Web site. Exotic animal owners fight back on other Web sites.
Vernon Yates, a man who has about 200 exotic animals in Seminole, has clashed with her repeatedly, even calling her “A.K.A. The Liar” on his own wildlife rescue Web site.
But Baskin says she’s not intimidated.
“It isn’t about me or any other individual,” she wrote in an e-mail. “It is the collective conscious of society that is evolving in such a way that keeping wild animals captive will soon be a thing of the past.”
Exotic animal owners say they are trying to expose her heavy-handed fundraising, and what they say is her true intent: to be the only game in town.
Judy Watson, former education director at Big Cat Rescue, says Baskin tells less-than-truthful stories about how she rescued some of her cats from the pet trade or abuse. Sometimes Baskin bred or bought the cats herself, Watson says.
One example is Shere Khan, an 800-pound Siberian tiger that was undernourished and stuck in a cage up to its belly in feces when it was rescued, according to the Big Cat Rescue Web site.
But the man who sold Shere Khan to Baskin in 1994 says the tiger had the run of his house in Flat Rock, Ind., even sleeping with a pillow and comforter in the living room.
“That’s baloney,” says Dennis Hill, 50, who said he sold the tiger to Baskin for $800. “She uses this creative writing and plays on people’s heartstrings. That situation never existed.”
Baskin says the stories on her Web site are all true and Hill gave her Shere Khan in that condition. But she admits that some of the animals she claims to have rescued were actually her pets. But she says she has changed.
Her supporters say she has worked tirelessly to make people aware that owning big cats is misguided.
“She has been a pioneer in changing people’s ways of viewing the animals from cute and cuddly balls of fur, to something they are going to be responsible for 20 to 25 years,” says Jennifer Ruszczyk, 33, a Big Cat volunteer.
- - -
All the controversy has made Baskin cautious. In person, she is quiet yet passionate, guarded yet pointed. She’ll talk about her purpose, but not her past.
She does write about it though. Her 12,000-page Web site is sprinkled with colorful stories about her childhood, the men in her life, her effort to lose weight and her infatuation with “The Secret,” a belief that positive thinking can create results. There’s even a video of her reading Wallace Wattles’ The Science of Getting Rich.
Baskin says she left her Tampa home at 15 and took up with an older man, an abusive drunk. Met another man where she worked as a bookkeeper. Married him at 17, had a baby girl at 19.
And then there she was walking along a Tampa road barefoot, trying to subdue her anger. It was 1980. She had just thrown a potato at her husband. Her baby was 6 months old. And Lewis drove by. He was in his 40s with a wife, young children. She was 19 and beautiful in the way that Suzanne Somers is beautiful.
He stopped the car. She got in.
“I fell in love with him immediately,” she says, smiling.
Baskin tried not to talk about Lewis, but inevitably he slipped into the conversation.
The two carried on an affair for a decade before Lewis’ wife divorced him. Though he had made millions in trucking and foreclosures, he gave Baskin a $14 engagement ring from a pawnshop.
“He looked like someone who basically came home from a 50-hour workweek on a road crew,” recalled James Moore, Lewis’ friend and a former volunteer at the sanctuary. “He Dumpster dove. You looked at him and you wanted to hand him money.”
Lewis and Baskin both loved animals even before they met. Lewis had owned swans and geese, raccoons, even prairie dogs. Baskin had bred Himalayan show cats, amassing a wall of ribbons and plaques.
Together, they got their first pet bobcat, Windsong, at an animal auction in 1992. One wasn’t enough. The way Baskin tells it, the couple found themselves at a Minnesota fur farm staring at 56 bobcat kittens in cages matted with fur and feces. They brought the cats back to a 40-acre parcel on Easy Street in northwest Hillsborough County. They had gotten the land in a foreclosure.
They called their new place Wildlife on Easy Street.
- - -
Trouble began to surface once the exotic cats came along. The couple’s relationship appeared to suffer, kind of like parents who fight about how to raise their kids.
Baskin wanted to change their mission from breeding and selling exotic cats to rescuing them.
Lewis didn’t.
By 1996, Lewis wanted to move the operation to a 200-acre farm he owned in Costa Rica. His wife didn’t.
Lewis told Anne McQueen, his assistant of 18 years, that he wanted a divorce. A year later, he walked into the Hillsborough courthouse and asked for a domestic violence injunction against his wife.
“Me and Carole got in a big fuss, she ordered me out of the house or she would kill me,” Lewis wrote in court documents. “She has a .45 (caliber) revolver and she took my .357 and hid it.”
A judge said there was “no immediate threat of violence” and denied the request.
The last time McQueen saw Lewis, he had argued with his wife and slept in a semitrailer on the property.
“Don did not leave of his own free will,” says McQueen, 53, who lives in Tampa. “He loved his money more than anybody, and he would have never left his money.”
In August 1997, police found Lewis’ van at a Pasco County airport with the keys on the floorboard. He was known to fly out of the country frequently, so police first thought he had just taken a trip. But as the months passed with no sign of Lewis, police flew to Costa Rica, chasing possible sightings. They also searched the wildlife sanctuary in Hillsborough.
Police found no sign of him.
Lewis never touched his $6-million estate again - but his family fought over it. Baskin had documents showing he left her in charge of his estate. Lewis’ children were mostly left out of the will except for a previously agreed upon trust.
In 2002, five years after he disappeared, a court declared Lewis dead. Most of his estate went to Baskin.
- - -
In 2004, Baskin walked down the beach on Anna Maria Island toward a man dressed like a caveman. She hit him over the head with a plastic bat. He threw her over his shoulder. They exchanged vows in the surf.
The man was Howard Baskin, a semiretired banker with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a law degree.
He has brought a corporate mind-set to Big Cat Rescue, now a $1-million operation with dozens of volunteers. He had the sanctuary’s name changed to Big Cat Rescue because Wildlife on Easy Street sounded like a bar. And he brought in corporate sponsors, including a Washington lobbyist.
Big Cat Rescue’s annual Fur Ball gala raised $120,000 last month - twice what it did the year before.
The nonprofit sanctuary charges $25 a person for tours. Last year, more than 26,000 people visited and for the first time it turned a profit, of $500,000.
The Baskins plan to use the money to build a wall around Big Cat Rescue since the sanctuary is surrounded by a major mall, a soon-to-be condo development and Veterans Expressway.
But they say the wall likely will not fend off the attacks from other exotic animal owners intent on using Carole Baskin’s past against her.
“What will carry her … is her passion for her mission and understanding that her role unfortunately includes being the subject of these attacks,” Howard Baskin wrote in an e-mail.
- - -
At the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, Detective Chris Fox skims through two volumes on Lewis’ disappearance.
It remains a cold case.
Fox says Lewis’ trips to Latin America “gave him a very exotic image and opened him up to rumors and questions about everything from drug smuggling and animal smuggling to money laundering and who knows what else. Add in a contentious relationship with his wife.”
There have been no tips in the case for years - except one in 2005. It came, Fox says, from another exotic animal owner. A former sanctuary volunteer was now saying she had not witnessed Lewis’ will.
Susan Aronoff Bradshaw said that after Lewis disappeared, Carole Baskin asked her to testify that she was there for the will signing when she was not.
Bradshaw, an exotic animal owner in Plant City, said she feared angering Baskin. “Carole’s made a big name for herself and I’m a big nobody,” Bradshaw said recently.
Fox believes she is telling the truth, but the statute of limitations on the possible perjury has passed. It is also not enough to focus the investigation back on Baskin or Big Cat Rescue.
But Fox is aware of the controversy swirling around Baskin.
“The only inquiries I have received on this case in the past year,” he said, “are from people who are business adversaries of Carole Baskin and who hope she will be discovered to be responsible for his disappearance.”
Times researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report.
[Last modified November 10, 2007, 23:58:07]
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