The Tiger LadyThis story about 'The Tiger Lady' has nothing to do with finance. It just amazed me, so here it is. By the time you read this, the story will be long gone from the news. However, as I write (the 12th November) on the evening news was a piece from America. A lady (Joan Byron-Marasek) has just had her 24 Bengal tigers removed from the cages and compounds built in her 12 acre New Jersey garden. It seems that they were held in conditions that are 'less than ideal' for a fully grown big cat. In truth, I know very little about ideal animal care and am happy to admit that I am ignorant of it, (why lie?) so that is not the point of writing this. However, at the end of the BBC's report, the reporter said that it is 'thought' that there are some 10,000 tigers held in captivity in the United States by individuals at their homes. What??? Ten thousand! That is a LOT of tigers. Now admittedly, this particular lady has well above her fair share of the American tiger population. But still, ten thousand? I remember reading recently that the population of America is in the region of 250 million. That is one tiger for every 25,000 people. Is it just me, or is that quite a shocking figure? Are these people trained? How are the tigers housed? Where would you walk them? And these numbers are just tigers. How many lions, panthers, leopards and other species are being held? I looked on the web, and found a story related to this lady. It seems that the court order to remove the tigers was started after one escaped in 1999 and was found (found?) by a neighbour scavenging in her rubbish bins for food. This was a 310 pound animal. Rather than catch it, they shot it. What if I had found it I thought. The tiger has razor sharp claws and teeth. I have a sharp and incisive sense of humour. A tiger is pure muscle. I, as you may have noticed, am not. More research (isn't Google great?) and I was able to find that this 10,000 figure is an estimate by the International Fund for Animal Welfare. They believe that these poor tigers are housed mostly in basements and backyards across the nation. Remember only last month there was a tiger and a crocodile recovered from a 21st floor flat in Harlem. It seems that there are dealers on the web who sell cubs across the US. It costs about $1800 or only $1000 for a lion cub. The thing I could not understand, was the stupidity. How on earth do you keep a tiger locked up in a residential flat for life and not get found out? Smuggling a cub into a building is probably not all that hard. Keeping it a secret from all those neighbours must be tough. How would you get it out of the building? I cannot think of a way that does not involve everyone in the area knowing. The UK used to have a situation like this (and Northern Ireland now does). In the 70's the British Government introduced legislation in a bid to make owners licenced and conditions for the animals to be improved. To avoid the regulations and prison, most people just let the animals loose into the countryside. Hence the legend of the 'Beast of Bodmin' et al. Can you imagine the problems if that happened in America? To put all of this in perspective, it is thought that the global population of tigers in the wild is now down to only 6000. By some strange twist of fate, and the fact that poachers do not go looking for tigers in the US, the tigers in basements are likely to be safer than those in the wild. What has the world come to? * This was first published in December 2003 *
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