I honestly don’t know, and I wish I could give you an answer. I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility. You know your cat’s behavior better than I ever could, so I think it’s worth trusting what your gut tells you on this one. My condolences on the loss of your cat.
Editing to clarify my phrasing: as said in the notes, cats absolutely can and do seek comfort from trusted people when stressed and in pain. What I’m not sure about is if your cat would have known what was happening / about to happen and sought you out because of it.
They function as a counterbalance when they’re hunting, allowing them to turn quickly and re-orient themselves in mid-air.
Here’s an incredible (but hard to watch) video of that tail serving a snow leopard well in a truly life-or-death situation. The cat has chased an Ibex off a cliff, and is attempting to both hang on to the prey and re-orient while falling a very large distance. (Spoiler: the ibex dies, but the snow leopard survives). A zoomed-in clip starts at 0:44.
In the last #CrouchingTigerHiddenData post, I promised we’d talk about what’s thought to happen to dead tigers. See, one of the narratives that’s common to encounter with regard to the supposed captive big cat population in the United States is: because we have such a big problem with “privately owned” tigers and potential parts ending up in the black market, we have less credibility as a country for commenting on wildlife trade issues internationally. There’s certainly enough rumors floating around about how the bodies of the alleged “thousands of backyard tigers in Texas” are disposed of to make anyone leery of trusting the United States. Except for one thing: I literally can’t find any evidence that any authorities anywhere think that the U.S. tiger population is contributing to black market trade.
The concern stems from a reasonable place. Nobody wants to imagine scenes similar to the black market items found at the Tiger Temple in Thailand when it was raided a couple of years ago. (Seriously. Don’t google it. There’s a lot of dead cubs in jars.)
(Photo Credit: CNN)
But here’s the thing: for all that people are fearmongering about how all the hidden tigers in the U.S. are maybe being killed for the black market trade, I’ve been able to find no mentions of any U.S. animals contributing recently domestic or international trade. 2018 was a big year for articles and exposes about tiger farms and black market trade given China’s changing stances on the legality of tiger products, so if there was any evidence the U.S. was involved, we’d have heard about it.
Back when the U.S. big cat population was much higher, ten or twenty years ago, there was legitimate concern that such things might be happening. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) went on record with their fears that the privately owned tiger population in the United States might be a future risk for contributing to the international black market, but their comprehensive report in 2008 identified no instances in which tiger parts sourced in the United States were used in such a manner. The primary factor contributing to potential future international trafficking identified by the WWF was the exemption of subspecies-hybrid tigers from the Captive Bred Wildlife permitting program (a loophole which had accidentally been created by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1998) and which was eliminated in 2016 specifically due to that concern. When the U.S. (FWS) published the final rule ending the generic tiger exemption in 2016, they noted that “there is no clear evidence that the U.S. captive tiger population has played a role in illegal international trade,” adding that it was still important to close the loophole due to “the precarious status of tigers in the wild and the potential that U.S. captive tigers could enter trade and undermine conservation efforts.” So, there’s no historical signs of black market tigers being a real issue in the United States. What about recently?
There’s been a ton investigative work done recently regarding the source of tiger parts for international trade; major suppliers in Asia, Eastern Europe, and potentially even South Africa were identified. Investigations by the Wildlife Justice Commission concluded that there are about 8,000 tigers in farms in China, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam; a five-year-long investigation by the Czech Environmental Inspectorate uncovered an illegal tiger farm in the Czech Republic with ties to Vietnam. The booming export trade in lion bones from South Africa, along with allegations that some of the Vietnamese tigers were acquired from that country, has led the international community to cast suspicious eyes on the potential contributions of South African’s more than 50 captive tiger facilities. What that tells us is that when huge populations of tigers exist, people know about them - and if their parts are entering the black market, there are a lot of international entities watching.
Most claims about the secret privately owned tiger population in the United States alleges that there are more than 5,000 tigers and potentially 10,000 or more: a number equal to or exceeding the total known population among all identified tiger farms worldwide. Parts from American animals entering the international market would not go unidentified due to the close scrutiny black market trade has been receiving in recent years, nor would it make sense for international agencies not to report an influx of tiger parts into the market from a country with such a presumed large and unregulated supply. And yet there has been zero mention of the tiger population in the United States in any of the recent reporting - most of the article didn’t even mention the country at all. That supports the validity of the statements by WWF and FWS over the last decade: that there is no sign of the U.S. population contributing to the international black market trade.
Similarly, the only instance of domestic trafficking I could find was over twenty years old. During the late 1990s, a small ring based out of the Midwest trafficked in tiger meat and skins, selling them out of an exotic animal game shop in Chicago; everyone involved was charged with multiple violations of the Endangered Species Act in 2002 at the end of an undercover investigation called Operation Snowplow. All of the facilities remembered by the big cat community as being involved in trafficking, such as the indictments of the owners of B.E.A.R.C.A.T Hollow and Animals of Montana, all appear to have been connected to Operation Snowplow. Sometimes you’ll hear that the large number of dead and preserved tigers and tiger cubs found at Tiger Rescue in California after a raid in 2003 were part of a black market operation, but there appears to be no data to support that claim - it seems to have been suggested to the media by the animal rights groups that were involved in the operation. While a lot of tigers were seized from truly deplorable conditions, the people who ran the facility were only charged with animal neglect; if there had been evidence of them trafficking tiger parts, they would have been charged with violating federal wildlife laws.
Tigers at Tiger Rescue in Colton, CA. (Photo Credit: SaveTheTigers)
In a time where there’s so much attention on tiger farms and the places that are contributing to the trade of tiger parts, it’s completely illogical that such behavior could be going on in the United States and not be the focus of at least some media coverage. One of the big things that has changed how much we know is the ubiquity of smartphones and social media. It’s much, much harder to keep any illicit activities with wildlife secret. When dealing with something as high-profile as the trafficking of endangered animal parts - especially animals as iconic and beloved as tigers - an absence of evidence is reasonable evidence of absence.
The next couple posts in this series will look at the practical outcomes of all this big cat population research, and why it matters.
Want to know more about the big cat population in the United States? Check out the rest of this series, tagged as “CrouchingTigerHiddenData”.
It’s really awful luck, and they did everything they should have in each situation. There were actually four giraffes lost there in 2018.
The first two giraffes that died were calves, one in September and one in November. The first was two months old and lived at the off-site conservation facility The Wilds, and was simply found dead one morning. He’d been observed nursing normally the day before and there were no indications anything had been wrong. The second was a calf living at the zoo who died after a really sudden decline that appeared to be related to some sort of gastric distress: they did a ton of diagnostics and gave her really intensive care with round-the-clock overnight treatment, but it wasn’t enough to save her. I don’t believe necropsy results have been released yet for either calf - it takes a while to get results back from labs, so in the case of the November calf, the investigation might be complete yet. Both of those deaths are heartbreaking because babies, but it’s important to also keep in mind that babies die pretty regularly in the wild no matter what species you’re talking about. American zoos have an annual mortality rate for giraffes in zoos that’s half what it is for wild giraffes, so it’s obvious that they’re doing a lot to protect and care for the babies born in human care. Sometimes things just happen, and sometimes diagnostics and treatment just can’t happen fast enough to be successful when you’re dealing with juvenile animals.
The most recent giraffe death was due to an attempted medical intervention in an emergency. An adult female was in labor with her calf the wrong way around, a condition which is not only dangerous for the baby but often for the mothers as well. Zoo staff tried to manually re-position the baby to no avail, and they decided to do a C-section. The comment I’ve seen in the media is that they thought this posed the best chance of saving both mother and baby, which implies that they weren’t sure the mother would survive the birth, no matter what happened to the calf. C-sections are very rare to do on giraffe because anesthetizing ruminants is risky (they’re likely to inhale their cud because regurgitating it is reflexive, but they can’t swallow when unconscious) and because they don’t tend to recover well. There are three known instances of a giraffe surviving a C-section worldwide. It turned out the calf had congenital deformities bad enough it wouldn’t have survived no matter what, and unfortunately, the mother collapsed shortly thereafter and couldn’t get back up. It’s awful. The vet team had to make a really hard call: leave the giraffe in a situation where one or both would probably die without intervention, or do something radical on the chance it could save one or maybe both of them. In that sort of situation, unless there are major welfare implications, zoos will choose to take the extreme action to try to save a life rather than letting nature take it’s course. The situation was stacked against them in ways they couldn’t have known about, but they did the absolute best they could.
This is the hardest part about working with animals. Sometimes things go wrong and there’s absolutely nothing that can be done to predict, prevent, or fix it. The Columbus Zoo has gone to heroic efforts to try to save their giraffes and they just were in situations where there wasn’t anything they could do. Those deaths aren’t their fault.
The Oregon Zoo is a good zoo. I am more familiar with their elephant program than any other part of the zoo, and I can personally vouch for the dedication and professionalism of their elephant keepers. The main group putting out the information you’ve come across, on the other hand - Free the Oregon Zoo Elephants - is run by armchair experts who specialize in pseudoscience and have aligned with PETA and other major anti-zoo groups to attack all of the elephant programs in United States. I am comfortable putting both of those statements in such declarative phrasing because I put in a lot of effort in 2018 get first-hand information from both sides: I’ve attended conferences put on by FOZE as well as the Elephant Manager’s Association, and I’ve toured the Oregon Zoo elephant barn as part of a different conference. What you’ve encountered is a combination of animal liberation activism and the zoo industry’s obnoxious tendency to never address the past because it might make them look bad. To explain that, let me touch on a few different things.
The recent death of the zoo’s five-year-old elephant calf, Lily, was absolutely horrible (and another one of those topics I wasn’t able to face blogging about yet). She was killed by a virus commonly referred to as EEHV: it’s a type of herpes virus that attacks epithelium cells, and it’s very deadly to both captive and wild elephants. The problem is that almost all adult Asian elephants carry multiple strains of EEHV with no symptoms, similar to how humans can go decades with the strain of herpes that causes cold sores without ever having an outbreak. There’s no way to keep baby elephants from being exposed to EEHV if you want them to live around other elephants, and it’s thought that young elephants are more likely to die from it when they’re exposed to it later in life. It’s a genuinely awful disease. By the time you can see clinical signs (lesions in the mouth or on other mucous membranes) the baby probably has like 48 hours to live, and they die from massive internal hemorrhage. Because it’s such a horrible, awful way to have to watch an animal die - and because it’s killing a lot of wild Asian elephants - the zoo industry does a ton of research on EEHV. We still don’t have a cure, but we’ve learned how to detect an active viral infection early through blood tests, and starting treatment as soon as that’s detected is crucial to helping baby elephants survive it. From what I know, the Oregon Zoo is rigorous about testing for any signs of EEHV … and even with all the treatment they were able to provide, the vet staff weren’t able to save Lily. Losing an elephant is always a devastating loss. A baby is worse. Losing a calf that way is… unimaginably hard to bear. But to the people focused on attacking the Oregon Zoo because they’re fundamentally against having any elephants in captive settings for any reason, it was simply another angle they could exploit.
Free the Oregon Zoo Elephants may have started as a grassroots group of citizen activists concerned about the treatment of a specific bull at the zoo (Packy), but they’re now a national presence that is networked with PETA, HSUS, Born Free USA, and other major animal liberation / anti-zoo advocacy groups. They get free communications strategy support from Care2, a petition platform that makes money by selling the email addresses of people who sign their petitions to group that include PETA for use in future marketing campaigns. They’re working in concert with multiple other anti-zoo-elephant groups, such as Elephant Guardians for Los Angeles (the group trying to remove Billy from the LA Zoo), and have the explicit backing of at least one of the sanctuaries that would profit from elephant exhibits closing. The problem with this? Is that it’s spearheaded by people who believe they have telepathic connections with elephants and can “see sadness” on their faces. They have exactly zero scientific background in animal welfare or management topics, nor any actual husbandry experience with exotic animals of any kind. FOZE frequently repeats incorrect or outdated information - I can’t tell if it’s because they literally don’t read the scientific literature and stay up on actual management protocols, or if it’s just convenient for them to misrepresent things to further their agenda. Many of their supporters are the type will happily go take selfies free-contact with orphaned elephants while on travel while simultaneously preaching that people should only ever be allowed to have the privilege of experiencing elephants if they can pay to see them in wild. They want to shut all the conservation work down, end all the research on captive elephants that will help preserve wild elephants, and put all the current zoo elephants out into sanctuaries where they’ll live out the rest of their lives with minimal management or enrichment. They’re about to sponsor a vigil to “remember the victims” of AZA’s elephant program - because they believe that a group of activists, backed by a couple of elephant behaviorists with name recognition, know more than all the keepers and veterinarians and researchers who have been working directly with elephants and studying them for decades.
So here’s the truth of the matter: yes, the Oregon Zoo used to manage their elephants in some pretty awful ways. So did every other zoo in the country. There was no data available fifty to one-hundred years ago that told anyone they should do anything different with their elephants. Zoo animal management has improved so massively in the last couple of decades, and nowhere more than with elephants. Zoos did what they thought was necessary to keep both staff and elephants alive when they were first brought into American zoos, and it has taken a huge amount of research and pioneering new styles of elephant care to reach where we are today. It’s not like that’s ending any time soon - we know we can still always continue to improve. The AZA recently approved a really large grant for researchers involved with multiple institutions to continue studying how to improve elephant welfare in captive settings. However, the zoo world is stuck in this genuinely stupid mentality where admitting care used to be sub-par would somehow mean they’re not the experts now. And because they can’t admit as a community that they used to treat elephants in ways we now know were harmful, they can’t tell the public about how they’ve grown and changed. (This is a massive frustration for me. I attended an professional elephant management conference and was floored by the stories of change and growth and innovation I kept hearing… and nobody is willing to message about them to the public because it’s “too risky.”) Never being willing to admit their faults or be critical of their own history means it’s really easy for groups like FOZE to use old history against them: if the zoo won’t say “yeah, we learned that practice of, say, separating babies at birth was shitty and we stopped” you can keep telling stories about that shitty practice from 30 years ago and people won’t know the difference.
So that’s what is happening with the Oregon Zoo. They’re stuck in a position where they can only play defense against the allegations being lobbed at them by AR groups, and they won’t actually defend themselves and correct the misinformation because they’d have to admit any previous fault in order to do it. Zoos do such an abominable job about telling the public about what’s being done to improve elephant care in zoos that Oregon can’t even market the quality of their program based on their groundbreaking research and innovations to elephant care. It’s so frustrating, because it makes it almost impossible for the public to make an educated choice: if the zoo choosing to only post cute videos and the anti-zoo people are the ones posting about behavior and biology and ethics, who seems more credible? Zoo politics are dumb, and the way zoos are currently dealing with politics regarding their industry is really hurting their credibility in the eyes of even the people who love them - your question is a great example of that.
You can feel free to keep loving the Oregon Zoo. They do good work. The elephant staff are dedicated and professional, they conduct continual research to improve the quality of life for their elephants, and they are trailblazing a new style of elephant care that has nothing in common with the problematic historical practices you’re hearing about.
Editing to add: for anyone interested, here’s a presentation from some of the Oregon Zoo’s researchers about how they studied and quantified the welfare of their elephants during the transition to the new exhibit.
UPDATE: I was asked by someone at the zoo to emphasize that they do actually talk about the evolution of elephant management practices at the zoo, and that the statement I made in this post were opinion. Please read the full correction here.
Hey, all. I’m sorry I haven’t continued with the big cat research write-ups as promised.
As you might have seen on the news recently, an intern was killed by a lion over the weekend at a facility in North Carolina. It’s not yet known how the lion escaped his secure lock-out while his enclosure was being cleaned, but he did, and after multiple tranquilizers failed he had to be shot in order for them to retrieve the intern’s body. It made all the incident data I’ve spent the last few months studying far too real - I’ve not only visited that facility, but also interviewed them for my research - and I’m not in much of a mood to keep writing about big cats right now.
I’m not going to blog about the incident until the entire investigation by the USDA is complete, and I haven’t linked a news article here on purpose. I can’t deal with the amount of theories and nasty implications being bandied about from all sectors right now, before the family and the facility have even had time to deal with the immediate trauma much less even mourn. I don’t know anything more than what is being reported about the incident. Nothing about what happened or why is public yet. What I can tell you is that I know how seriously that facility takes their safety protocols and how much personal responsibility the leadership feels for keeping their people safe.
I expected the animal rights world to attack them when I heard what had happened: they’re a small, unaccredited USDA-licensed facility, and they’re in one of the four states left without laws regulating big cat ownership. Regardless of the fact that the facility is not a “pet” ownership situation and the fact that most of their big cats are rescues, placed with them by the USDA in 2004 after a seizure, they’re not AZA and PETA / HSUS already had the state targeted for legislative action in 2019. Now the people at the facility, already dealing with the aftermath of a horrible incident, will be brutally excoriated in public to advance a legislative agenda - and the poor intern’s family won’t be able to mourn in peace, because their child’s death will be a talking point. What’s worse, AR groups are bringing back their federal version of the bill (which my big cat research proves is based on claims that are flat out false) and so they’ll likely take this incident and all the horrible details loudly to D.C.
What I didn’t expect is for other zoos to throw them under the bus, too. I’ve seen at least two statements so far, both from Zoo Miami’s communications director, intimating that the incident happened because the facility felt it was cost-prohibitive to build appropriate enclosures for the lion… while simultaneously using a TV interview about the incident to promote AZA’s brand in contrast. This is the same guy who told the media “it’s an accident and accidents happen” when a zookeeper was injured by a tiger at his facility in 2016. I’m appalled and outraged to the point that I can’t stop shaking. Everyone in the zoo field knows that something like this could happen to us, or our friends and coworkers and loved ones, no matter what accreditation your facility holds. It did happen to an AZA-institution, two years ago, in Palm Beach. You don’t shit on people after they’ve gone through something like that. You support them. The smaller facilities showed up to publicly support the Palm Beach staff after their tragedy, because no matter what inter-industry politics are going on at the time, that’s what you do. It doesn’t look like that’s what is going to happen this time, because the inter-industry politics are now too pervasive to be set aside. I’m not proud to be part of the industry, today.
I’ll go back to regular blogging and answering asks for now, and we’ll return to the big cat data at some point in the future. Thanks for bearing with me.
FYI, when talking about the incident in NC, I was informed by a friend of the intern who was killed that they went by Alex and preferred they/them pronouns.
I really don’t know enough to be able to even make an educated guess at what happened, and unfortunately, since nobody observed the incident I don’t know if we’ll ever have more details. Here’s a link to the story for people who haven’t heard about it yet: the male lion at the Indianapolis zoo was killed by his mate. It is a tragic situation and I know it’s super hard on the keepers who worked with those animals, so I’m asking folk to keep comments on this post respectful.
Sudden aggression or conflict between animals that have lived peaceably together for years isn’t unheard of in the animal kingdom. There are so many variables that can play into changing a situation: availability of resources, physical health, estrus cycle, an animal’s given mood on that day… and some interaction that might be fine in 99 other situations suddenly has a different variable change and that 100th time there’s suddenly a serious problem. (For instance: conflict over who gets to eat a delicious snack first is one thing on a warm sunny day when you feel good and you’ve just eaten dinner, and an entirely different situation on a chilly morning when your joints are stiff and you’re hangry).
Despite the fact that the internet likes to think about big cats as being simply bigger versions of domestic housecats, we have to remember that they’re large, powerful predators who solve conflicts with teeth and claws. Even a minor scuffle can leave a lion with some serious scrapes and cuts. It’s worth keeping in mind that this situation may not have been about something that “was worth” a fight to the death; it’s more probable that a conflict over something ended up escalating until it was deadly for the male involved.
As to the story about why the wolf was euthanized, it’s fake news. As The Dodo is reporting - I’m not linking it because I will not give them traffic - the story broke after what appears to be a disgruntled employee contacted the animal rights-based, anti-zoo organization ZooCheck. Kali was almost 14 - she had long outlived the normal 5-6 year lifespan for the wild wolf, and was pretty elderly by even captive standards. Here’s what the zoo tweeted:
“Degenerative problems:” a phrase which here means age related health issues. Think about an elderly dog - they can get arthritis, or develop cataracts, or stop being able to really absorb nutrition from their food, or develop doggy dementia… all of these things can and do happen to elderly wild canids as well. Yes, a few wolves can live a couple years longer than Kali did, but that’s an extreme - not the norm - and it is always accompanied by age-related health issues. I don’t know exactly what issues Kali was dealing with, but I can assure you that the zoo staff had been tracking her welfare for a long time before making the hard choice that it was time to let her go. The Calgary Zoo is AZA-accredited, and having just spent a week at their mid-year conference, I can tell you one session was a comprehensive four-hour class on assessing welfare and quality of life specifically just for geriatric animals.
ZooCheck and The Dodo appear to be playing this off as a situation where the animal was euthanized to bring in new animals, and I can tell you that AZA zoos do not do that - no matter how the story is spun when it reaches the outside world, there will always be more behind a euthanasia decision than is released to the public. I have personally seen many facilities care for geriatric animals long past when AR groups like to claim they’ll be “hidden in the back” or “euthanized because they’re no long attractive to look at” - hell, I’ve even participated in their care. Yes, the zoo director did say that Kali had been having some social issues for a while. Yes, the zoo had acquired another group of wolves that were not yet on display. That doesn’t mean that they killed Kali so they could put the new animals out on display.
For one, any new animals at any zoo have to go through a lengthy quarantine process to make sure they’re not going to bring any sort of disease or parasite into the collection, and the process of transferring animals between facilities is lengthy, involves a lot of paperwork, and is often weather dependent, so animal moves are often planned quite far in advance of when the animals will actually be on exhibit to the public. I can’t speak for the zoo here, but it’s entirely possible the transfer was arranged when it became clear Kali’s quality of life was declining. And for two, even if the zoo was planning on moving the new group of wolves into the exhibit while Kali was alive, that doesn’t mean they’d have to kill her. “Social issues” doesn’t mean they couldn’t try to introduce the animals, or rotate them through the space (remember, many zoo exhibits have multiple outdoor areas, even if they’re not all visible to guests), or find Kali another off-exhibit area to live in. With the arthritis and joint issues even ZooCheck acknowledges she had, it’s entirely plausible she was also have issues navigating the terrain of the exhibit and needed to be moved to a location that was more appropriate for an elderly animal. (It’s worth keeping in mind, too, that the person who contacted animal rights groups is not likely to have actually worked with Kali - her keepers are grieving, not trying to cause sensationalist media that slams their zoo. And if you’re not working with an animal directly, even if you work for the same facility, you’re not likely to have access to all the details about medical issues or management choices for it.) I haven’t had a chance to check in with anyone from Calgary, but I can tell you from personal experience that there are plenty of entirely good reasons that what ZooCheck and The Dodo are choosing to frame as a callous and immoral situation could have occurred.
And, of course, ZooCheck and The Dodo are saying that Kali should have gone to a sanctuary instead, which is pretty much their MO at this point. They recommended The Wild Animal Sanctuary (a mega-sanctuary in Colorado). Let’s look at that. The fastest route between the Calgary Zoo and TWAS is over a 16-hour drive. That doesn’t count the fact that animal transport vehicles might drive slower than normal cars for the sake of their passengers, or that drivers might need to stop for a break (or overnight, if there’s only one drive), or that border crossings take time. Overall, it’s probably an estimated 24 hours of travel? That’s a lot of stress on an old animal. Not to mention that, if they did move Kali, she might have to go through quarantine for weeks before leaving the zoo as well as on the other end of the trip, and she’d be taken away from everything familiar and all the staff she knew and trusted. ZooCheck and The Dodo are just flat out wrong that that’s an acceptable management choice for a geriatric animal. (It seems to be something both the organizations support, though, since they’re also both advocating for an elderly elephant from the Edmonton Zoo be moved to the PAWS sanctuary in California - even though experts have determined the multiple-day transport would probably kill her).
As to your question, I’m not too worried about the zoo being shut down over this - Calgary was accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums in 2013, which speaks to a lot about the way their facility cares for animals and also the connections it is likely to have with their local government and regulatory bodies. Now, ZooCheck does have a history of helping other groups attack Canadian zoos (they were involved in the seizure of the Toronto Zoo elephants), but hopefully there’s really not enough to this story to give them any actual clout. AZA zoos keep records - it’s part of the accreditation standards they’re required to fulfill. If the local agencies really thought there was anything untoward about this story, they could always ask to see the welfare assessments for Kali, the veterinary reports, and (when available) her necropsy findings.
