Restrictions loom for exotic animals business
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Christie Carr gets a lick from her pet kangaroo, Irwin, at her home in Broken Arrow, Okla. Carr says she and her therapy kangaroo, Irwin, are leaving Broken Arrow and moving to McAlester, Okla. Carr said she was told by animal control that by keeping the disabled kangaroo in her home that she was violating city ordinance and will receive fines and or the seizure of the animal.
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MACON, Mo. -- The man raised a tawny ball of fluff above his head, its black button eyes seeming to widen as it took in the audience surrounding the ring.
"Baby cougar! Bottle-fed!" the auctioneer at the Lolli Brothers Livestock Market announced on a morning in early December, launching into his rat-a-tat call for bids over the loudspeaker. But there was not a hand in sight in the audience of about 100. They were farmers in Carhartt work gear, Amish men and the occasional woman -- one whose pet vervet monkey sipped a Sprite.
The starting price dropped, to $200. The cougar's owner, standing in the ring, shook his head. It was too low. No sale.
It has been an uncertain time for people who sell and breed exotic creatures since an episode last October, when the police in Zanesville, Ohio, killed 49 exotic animals, including wolves, lions, bears and 18 Bengal tigers. Their debt-ridden owner, Terry Thompson, allegedly flung open their cages moments before he fatally shot himself.
Public fury over the episode initially raged in many directions: at the law enforcement officers; at Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio, for letting restrictions expire on ownership of exotic pets by people with a history of animal cruelty; and at Thompson, whose actions ultimately led to the deaths of his pets.
Now it has landed on the buyers and sellers of exotic animals, who ply their trade online and at places like the Lolli Brothers Market, one of a handful of specialized animal auctions in the West and Midwest. Many animal rights groups were outraged that the types of animals in the Zanesville menagerie could even be obtained as pets.
Ohio was one of seven states with no regulation regarding the sale or ownership of these types of creatures, according to the Humane Society of the United States. Days after the episode, Mr. Kasich signed an executive order to increase the powers of humane officers, shut down unauthorized auctions and restrict existing ones. New laws are being drafted that may ban sales to those who are not professional handlers. Only 18 states currently have an outright ban on exotic animals as pets; other states require owners to obtain proper permits.
The Humane Society is now working within each unregulated state to put new laws on the books, said Wayne Pacelle, the society's president and chief executive. Two proposed federal laws are also gaining steam -- one would ban the interstate transport and import of many large constricting snakes and the other would ban primates from being transported between states for sale as pets. The Humane Society estimates that there are 15,000 big cats in private hands, almost all bred in the United States, and around 15,000 primates.
The potential impact of new restrictions worries the insular community of breeders and brokers of exotic animals, whose livelihoods depend on an open market for an orangutan or an ocelot (and whose ranches and sale barns are located mostly in the states with the most lax laws)
"They make rules and laws because somebody did something wrong once," said Arden Johnson, a retired medical contractor who has had, at various times, a lion and a bear cub on his commercial bison ranch, Johnson Farm's Bison World, in Noblesville, Ind. "And now everybody has to suffer the consequences."
Jack Hanna, who directs the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, is on the committee drafting Ohio's new laws.
Mr. Hanna helped the authorities at the scene of the Zanesville escape. "It was like Noah's ark crashed," he said. "It was beyond any horror."
"I'm not trying to take away anybody's animals, I'm not trying to take away a dream of someone," Mr. Hanna said. "I don't want people to have to go through what I went through."
The Lolli Brothers livestock auction has been a family business since 1947. Most weeks, the four Lolli brothers apply their auctioneers' sing-song patois to the sale of everyday ranch animals like burger-bound Jersey steers and stocky quarter horses. But several times a year, the sawdust-strewn ring hosts a different sort of beast.
At an auction in early December, the livestock pens were filled with towering ostriches, (sold for about $1,000); zebus, cows the size of Labrador retrievers, (about $1,200); and fluffy llamas (a bargain at $20 a head). In a heated room, a baby sloth curled around a fuzzy blanket and two still-nursing African porcupines with punk-rocker sprays of baby quills. In a crate, a knee-high zebra foal bared its still-toothless gums. On one wall hung a python print pocketbook with two blond paws poking out: a sleeping kangaroo joey.
When the exotic auction is on, Macon (population just over 5,000) buzzes with visitors from far and wide. Some buyers come from zoos, others have private petting farms or animal parks. Some just want an out-of-the-ordinary pet, said Tim Lolli, one of the four brothers and two sisters who run the family business.
(The baby cougar that failed to sell initially did not necessarily indicate a downturn in the market. People looking to own big cats may need state permits; the cub was sold later that day.)
Public condemnation from animal rights groups is something breeders are accustomed to. But when an exotic animal makes news, as in Zanesville, or in 2009, when a pet chimpanzee mauled a woman in Stamford, Conn., anger reaches a fever pitch, Mr. Lolli said.
Charly Seale, the executive director of the Exotic Wildlife Association, a national association that represents breeders of exotic hoofed animals, says new regulations are choking pockets of the industry.
The barasingha, for example, an Indian swamp deer that is nearly extinct in the wild, Mr. Seale said, was plentiful on Texas game ranches before the Fish and Wildlife Service extended its classification as an endangered species several decades ago to include those in captivity. Today, breeders need special permits to raise and hunt barasingha, and there are fewer than 300 statewide.
"If the rules and the regulations become so cumbersome the breeder is not going to do it," he says. It can kill peoples' livelihoods."
Antony Matone, a whitetail deer breeder from Mountain Home, Texas, said he embodied that worst-case scenario. Two years ago he got rid of his Asian caracal cat, spotted African serval cat, baboons and his beloved mountain lion, named Charlie, whose portrait he displayed on his iPhone. Increasingly restrictive local laws and the rising price of insuring his facility had made it impossible to keep them, he said. Now he just has two wolves, he said.
"It hurt," he said. "When you have these animals and you raise them and you're following the laws. And then every year they come back with something different, something trying to get you out of business," he said. "I gave in."
Mr. Hanna said the potential hazards exotic animals posed outweighed other factors. "I've seen a grizzly bear take apart a concrete container or steel like it's a marshmallow," he said. In 1973, he said, a lion he owned ripped off a toddler's arm.
"We're not trying to put anyone out of business," he said. "But the average person should not have an exotic animal as a pet."
First Published January 15, 2012 12:00 am
