Category: panthera

Tiger Kills ‘Joe Exotic’ Associate At Roadside Zoo

Ryan Easley “wanted to be the one with the most tigers in the ring at one time,” Joe “Exotic” Maldonado said of the Oklahoma man.

A circus big cat trainer and associate of so-called “Tiger King” Joe Maldonado was mauled to death by a tiger at a roadside zoo on Saturday.

Authorities say 37-year-old Ryan Easley was conducting a “show” at the Growler Pines Tiger Preserve when a tiger he “owned” turned on him. The captive predator mauled Easley, attacking his neck and shoulders “in full view of a group of visitors, including children,” PETA wrote in a statement calling on federal authorities to cancel the facility’s licenses.

Easley with a white tiger. Credit: Ryan Easley/Instagram

While Easley called the facility a preserve, others described it as a roadside zoo, and genuine animal sanctuaries do not put animals on public display. The roadside zoo description aligns with the Oklahoma man’s past as a circus trainer of big cats, and Maldonado — who was the subject of the popular 2020 Netflix documentary, Tiger King — seemed to confirm that description when he issued a statement on his friend’s death.

“He wanted to be the one with the most tigers in the ring at one time,” Maldonado wrote in a statement from prison. “Some of his cats were crazy in the head, but it was about having the most performing at one time at all costs.”

Easley acquired some of his tigers from Maldonado, who was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder for hire and 17 counts of violating federal conservation laws in 2019. Maldonado, who remains incarcerated in a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, tried in 2017 to hire two men to kill Big Cat Rescue’s Carole Baskin, an activist with whom he had a years-long feud. One of the men Maldonado tried to hire was an FBI informant.

Maldonado is serving a 21-year federal prison sentence. Mugshot credit: Santa Rosa County Jail

PETA has accused Easley of mistreating, neglecting and abusing the tigers at his facility. Tigers are apex predators and hyper-carnivores who do not recognize social hierarchy or have any innate compulsion to follow orders from humans, so “taming” them and getting them to “perform” involves coercion, including physical punishment, withholding food and torture. The brutal mistreatment required to force elephants, lions, tigers and other animals to perform is one reason why traditional animal circuses no longer exist in the west.

Maldonado admitted as much in his statement, noting “you don’t get a tiger to jump through a hoop of fire because they love you.”

“It’s never safe for humans to interact directly with apex predators, and it’s never a surprise when a human is attacked by a stressed big cat who has been caged, whipped, and denied everything natural and important to them,” PETA’s Debbie Metzler wrote in a statement.

Former big cat handler and caretaker Katherine Lee Guard, who is now an activist against keeping big cats as pets and using them in the entertainment industry, spoke to PITB about her experiences in 2023. She noted tigers can turn on their handlers at any time, even if the latter hand-reared the felids since infancy. Once their predatory instincts are triggered, the apex predators feel a powerful compulsion to attack.

Even in accredited zoos where tigers are provided with large enclosures designed for their well-being, given plenty of enrichment and stimulation, and fed well, Guard said people should never enter an area without barriers between themselves and the big cats.

“The cost is too great if something goes wrong,” she said. “And something always goes wrong given enough time.”

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Wordless Wednesday: They Rule The Night

Cats were built by mother nature to stalk by starlight.

From the African savannas to the Andean mountains, the jungles of the Amazon to the Hollywood hills, and everywhere in suburban America, cats of all types and sizes prowl the night. With eyes that are up to eight times more sensitive in the dark, incredibly sensitive hearing, and whiskers that can pick up the slightest change in air density, felids were built by mother nature to stalk by starlight.

Some cat species are crepuscular, some are nocturnal, but as ambush predators, they’re all at their best when hunting under the cover of darkness.

Image credits, top to bottom: Per Karlson/PVKFoto, Reddit r/natureisf***inglit, Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Preserve, Wikimedia Commons, Steve Winter/National Geographic, National Park Service, Colorado Parks and Wildlife

You’re No One Without A Pet Tiger: How The Gulf’s Rich Kids Show Off

Cheetahs are on the precipice of extinction because of relentless poaching on behalf of the children of oligarchs, and showing off collections of rare big cats has become de rigueur on social media.

Imagine you’re an obscenely wealthy Emirati heir, a Saudi prince, or the scion of a global business empire in Dubai.

You started an Instagram account, but sadly photos of your Lamborghinis and McLarens aren’t really moving the needle. In the circles you run in, everyone has those. Likewise, your $20 million digs are pedestrian by the standards of Gulf opulence, and showing off private jets is so 2023.

You need something to stand out, to show the peasants that you’re not just a fabulously affluent heir, you’re also really cool and everyone should envy you.

You need a big cat.

Maybe even cats, plural, if you can’t swing an ultra rare white lion or an 850lb liger on the illegal wildlife market.

“I’m not trying too hard in this photo, am I?”

Just imagine your follower count blowing up, and how jealous the peasantry will be when you post images of your apex predator pet chillin’ in the passenger seat of your Sesto Elemento, with a pair of $20,000 sunglasses on his head for the lulz.

That’s what’s currently happening in the Gulf among the incredibly well-off children of royalty, aristocrats, oil oligarchs, shipping magnates and other bigwigs, a report in Semafor notes.

“Of course you can’t put them in the Lamborghini, beratna! You don’t want those claws near your leather seats. Besides, my liger shall have his own custom made Koenigsegg with a gear shift he can operate by paw!”

In addition to providing compelling ‘tent to their social feeds in the form of photos and videos, it’s clear the owners believe big cats offer a kind of osmotic badassery: if you have your very own lion, you must be a powerful and interesting person!

This kind of thing is not new. Years ago there was a brief outcry when wildlife groups begged authorities to protect cheetahs, who are already critically endangered and risk extinction if global elites are allowed to continue to poach them and their cubs from the wild.

As CNN noted at the time:

“While many of these states – including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia – ban the private ownership and sale of wild animals, enforcement is lax.

The overwhelming majority of these cheetahs end up in Gulf Arab mansions, where Africa’s most endangered big cats are flaunted as status symbols of the ultra-rich and paraded around in social media posts, according to CCF and trafficking specialists.”…

The trend is of “epidemic proportions,” according to CCF, an organization devoted to saving cheetahs in the wild. At the current rates of trafficking, the cheetah population in the region could soon be wiped out.

“If you do the math, the math kind of shows that it’s only going to be a matter of a couple of years [before] we are not going to have any cheetahs,” said Laurie Marker, an American conservation biologist biologist and founder of CCF.

Youtube has its share of dauphins showing off cats and cars, and Instagram has an entire sub-genre of pages featuring men in pristine white robes posing in million-dollar hyper cars next to cheetah cubs or tigers who have been sedated to their eyeballs.

As the Semafor report explains, technically keeping big cats is illegal in most Gulf states, except for the super rich. They can skirt existing wildlife laws by getting permits as private “zoo” and “sanctuary” operators, and who’s to say a good zookeeper can’t keep his jaguars in an enclosure with Maseratis and Aston Martins?

One guy even runs a place called Fame Park, a private zoo. The only way to get in is if he deems you famous enough, and thus worthy, to gaze upon his wondrous menagerie of endangered beasts.

The park’s motto is “Where luxury meets wildlife wonder,” and its operator styles himself as a conservationist who just happens to enjoy rubbing elbows with esteemed figures like Andrew Tate and Steven Seagal.

“What pet? I am a licensed zookeeper! In my zoo, enrichment is provided by Ferrari.”

Things really haven’t changed much in the last few hundred years, have they? One way royals and aristocrats amused themselves was by sending explorers to far off lands and instructing them to bring back strange animals.

That’s how elephants ended up in the courts of European kings, and how Hanno the Navigator found himself in mortal danger when he tried to capture gorillas, then decided they were “too violent” to drag back home and had them executed.

A court elephant photographed in 1851 by Eugene Clutterbuck Impey, an English administrator in the British Raj. This elephant is pictured in regalia used for royal processions and other ceremonies. Credit: National Gallery of Scotland

These days, the centers of power have shifted, but human behavior has not. Part of me still has hope, but the cynic in me fears people with the means to exploit rare and endangered animals will continue to do so until there are no more animals left to exploit.

Another critically endangered pet cheetah in a hyper car. Credit: Some clown’s Instagram

Everyone knows that in the wild, big cat cubs nurse from Ferraris and Lamborghinis, and cheetahs learn to run fast by participating in drag races against the hyper cars. Credit: Another clown’s Instagram

Rangers In India Race To Capture Man-Eating Tiger Before Mobs Kill It

Angry locals say they’ll kill the tiger if forest rangers do not after the predator ambushed and ate a mother of two in southern India on Friday.

Forest rangers are on the hunt to capture a man-eating tiger who killed a woman and dragged her body into a forest on Friday, while frustrated locals say they’ll destroy the predator if the government does not.

The victim, a 45-year-old woman named Radha, was employed by a local coffee plantation in Mananthavady and was harvesting coffee beans when the big cat ambushed her, according to multiple reports in local media. Mananthavady is a city of about 47,000 people in southern India surrounded by rural farmland.

A Thunderbolt team — a special forces unit trained in counter-insurgency — was patrolling the area when they found blood and signs of a struggle. They followed the tiger’s pug marks into a nearby forest, where they found Radha’s body “half eaten,” the New Indian Express reported.

The victim was a mother of two and was buried in a service earlier today, according to the news service Bharat.

The attack and the livid response of people in the area highlight the conflicts that India must manage as it works to save tigers, the country’s critically endangered national animal, while also protecting the public. India’s government has relocated thousands of families away from the vast country’s 27 tiger preserves, but the big cats are oblivious to the boundaries of the preserves.

Earlier this month, people living in several contiguous towns over a stretch of more than 130 miles in eastern India barricaded themselves indoors, refusing to leave for work or to travel to local markets, after a pair of hungry tigers had drifted off a preserve and had begun to feast on local livestock.

A tiger who was seized and relocated from a roadside zoo operated by Joseph “Tiger King” Maldonado-Passage. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In Mananthavady, locals threatened a hartal, a form of strike aimed at gaining concessions from the government, if the tiger is not killed. Forest rangers and local government leaders said they would capture and relocate the tiger, who has been spotted on a trail camera, but the locals say that’s not good enough.

“If you can’t shoot the tiger, then shoot us instead,” one protester told forestry officials.

Others said they’d take matters into their own hands if authorities don’t kill the tiger. It’s not an empty threat: in 2019, a mob of enraged villagers beat a tigress to death after she attacked a person.

Radha was the third person to be killed by tigers in the area since 2023, when two farmers were killed by the endangered apex predators in incidents about 11 months apart.

In addition to the anger and grief felt by family and friends of the victims, the government’s compensation program is also controversial. Radha’s family will receive ₹11 lakh, according to reports, which was about $12,800 in USD according to exchange rates on Jan. 25.

The program has been condemned by people who say the government is wrong to put an arbitrary monetary value on human life, and in recent years there have been attempts to provide families with resources like job training in addition to monetary compensation. The issue remains a sore spot and a topic of ongoing litigation because the government did not compensate victim families for decades, and does not automatically provide compensation if the victims trespass onto preserve land.

Tigers are the largest and most dangerous of all cat species, and are arguably the most dangerous land animal on the planet, but the vast majority of them do not attack humans and give people a wide berth. Unlike most other felids, they enjoy water and swimming, especially in warm climates. Credit: Warren Garst/Wikimedia Commons

In the meantime, a team comprised of rangers, veterinarians, expert trackers and others — totaling about 100 people — was racing to get to the tiger before the mobs do, utilizing drones, traps and thermal imaging cameras to find and capture the elusive predator.

“The animal is still roaming in the same vicinity, and we are strengthening local patrols to prevent further casualties,” KS Deepa, chief conservator of forests in the region, told local media.

Most tigers who turn man-eater do so because they can no longer take down their usual prey without difficulty, either due to old age or because their teeth are damaged. The infamous Champawat tigress, who killed 436 people during a decade-long reign of terror from the late 1890s through 1907, turned man-eater when a hunter’s bullet shattered one of her canines.

It’s wasn’t clear what forestry officials planned to do with the tiger if it’s captured, but they told reporters they are forbidden by law from killing the animal unless other options are exhausted.

“There are three ways to capture the tiger,” A.K. Saseendran, India’s minister of forests and wildlife, told The Hindu. “We will try to cage it as the first step. If that fails, we will try to tranquilize it and move it out of Wayanad. Killing the tiger is the last resort.”