We're here to discuss the bad parts, explain the confusing bits, research the current topics, and showcase the cutest, coolest, most unknown content - all while putting animal behavior in its own proper context.
Hi! I grew up in the dfw area, and I’m here rn to spend the holidays with my family. The dallas zoo is my local zoo, and I think maybe I can help clarify something? The zoo officials were emphasizing that nova wasn’t dangerous bc people here in dfw have a lot of guns, and there was a real concern that people would hear about what was happening on the news, picture a massive leopard stalking the streets and eating children, and start vigilanting with their shotguns and handguns in order to ‘protect their property’. the zoo staff were focusing on looking for her in the zoo grounds itself but a lot of the news was focusing on keeping people from panicking.
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Yup, that’s absolutely what was going on! I know so many people were worried that someone would go try to hunt her for fun or “protection”.
But that’s not what they said. For instance, an article quoting the VP of Animal Care stat “clouded leopards are dramatically different animals from other leopards. They are much smaller, weigh about 30 pounds and pose no danger to people.” That’s not "there’s no danger to people in this instance.” And while it may seem like splitting hairs, it still matters because this is an animal that is managed like a dangerous animal, that was literally just listed in a federal bill as being a dangerous animal, etc. Just because they’re skittish and likely to avoid people doesn’t mean they aren’t potentially dangerous if you do end up in a close scenario with one.
Yeah, in crisis communications you can’t get into all the details, and I know that. But it still perpetuates misinformation. I mostly mentioned it because I’m spicy about the BCPSA and I got snarky whiplash seeing an AZA institution swap messaging so quickly.
It was good that they made clear she wasn’t going to be hunting people or doing anything dangerous to the surrounding community. I just wish they’d been a little more specific, because I’ve already found at least one video from an exotic pet Youtube channel entitled something like “Dallas Zoo admits clouded leopards aren’t dangerous.” Clarifying misinformation after it spreads is really dang hard.
I was reminded by a reply that I should probably emphasize this: the Big Cat Public Safety Act literally has an exemption specifically for state colleges and universities. Why? Because there’s two schools with live mascots who live in habitats on campus, and their representatives absolutely would not have supported the bill if it had taken away their college’s cats.
Meet Mike VII at Louisiana State University:
And Leo III at the University of North Alabama:
(Leo III’s mate, Una, passed away a few years ago).
It’s tradition for these schools to have a live mascot, so the bill that *checks notes* is meant to end unethical commercial of big cats had to ensure that they’d still be allowed to have a big cat living next to their stadiums. Luckily neither school takes their mascots to the sidelines of football games anymore, but LSU actually only just stopped that practice in 2017.
These mascot cats have consistently been part of the commercial trade in big cats, although it’s unclear if they will continue to be (even though it’s still legal for these schools to buy their next mascot). Una and Leo III came from a wildlife park in New Hampshire as young cubs, and Mike VII is ostensibly a rescue but the story of the facility he came from doesn’t quite pass the smell test.
Here’s the wild thing. Under the new law, right, most entities that want to keep big cats - like sanctuaries and zoos - have to follow certain rules regarding fencing and breeding restrictions and preventing public contact in order to be allowed to do so. But state schools? Nada. They can buy, sell, and breed without any limits. They could, quite literally, run a tiger puppy-mill or start a cub petting franchise across multiple state universities and it wouldn’t be illegal. Obviously that’s a worst case scenario that’s super unlikely, but it goes to show just how odd it is that these entities have a totally unrestricted exemption. Credible zoological facilities and sanctuaries have to comply with much stricter regulations to prove they’re not exploiting the cats in their care, but for the sake of football, state colleges and universities can do whatever they want!! (sigh). It’s amazing how really specific political interests, such as the culture around football mascots, can result in carve-outs in even bills promoted specifically to create consistent regulations for animal welfare.
You might have heard that the Big Cat Public Safety Act was passed by Congress last week, and is on its way to be signed into law by the President. While I so not oppose with the main goals of the act (ending private ownership of big cats and public contact with them), I have had serious concerns about the impact of other aspects of it for a long time.
For years, I’ve been pointing out that vague language regarding exemptions in the bill could really negatively impact credible zoos and sanctuaries. The bill authors/sponsors clearly didn’t intend the bill to have that result, but because they weren’t more exact with their wording, the full impacts of the law won’t be clear until it’s fully implemented by the Department of the Interior. Since a different federal department oversees zoo and sanctuary regulation, it doesn’t make sense to assume that the Department of the Interior will automatically interpret the new law in a way that aligns with how the industry currently functions.
In the best case scenario, there’s nothing to worry about. In a worst case scenario, though, credible zoos and sanctuaries might find their operations, exhibit construction, and animal programs detrimentally impacted. If there’s any possibility of the latter occurring, there has to be attention on the process to try to ensure it doesn’t come to pass.
This article is my overview of some of the biggest possible problems that could come from a bad implementation of the Big Cat Public Safety act. It’s short (for me), sweet, and simple. Just because the law has been passed doesn’t mean the work has ended - now it just involves holding the federal government accountable for implementing the bill in a way that doesn’t cause harm to credible facilities and programs.
I am incredibly proud to announce the publication of my first peer-reviewed paper! It’s (utterly unsurprisingly at this point) about big cats! Specifically, it’s a census of the big cat populations in federally-regulated facilities in the United States. Even better, it is open access, so free to read at the link above.
It turns out there really isn’t data about the total number of each species of big cat being collected anywhere. That’s important information to have, considering the frenzy around Tiger King and pending federal legislation to regulate who can own big cats and what strictures it would place on businesses that do. I solved that by using USDA records to identify facilities with big cats, sort them, and use the inventories on those records to count the cats of each species.
Some pertinent details!
- I defined “big cat” according to the list of prohibited wildlife species in the Captive Wildlife Safety Act (and what will apply to the Big Cat Public Safety Act), rather than phylogenetically. The public generally thinks of big cats as more than just Panthera, and it makes sure that error won’t be introduced when discussing the results in the context of pending legislation. The species covered as “big cats” in the census are: tigers, lions, cougars, leopards, jaguars, snow leopards, cheetah, clouded leopards, and hybrids of those species.
- There is some imprecision in the census data due to the rolling nature of the USDA inspection cycle and the variable length of inspection intervals. To that end, the census results are most useful as a snapshot of the approximate population of each species and their distribution across business types and geography, not as an exact count of the individuals of each species.
- 111 cats from three of the facilities in Tiger King weren’t included in the results. This was because their facility had lost USDA licensure and/or recently had their animals confiscated and moved to sanctuaries. During data collection USDA had not yet re-inspected the facilities that were identified as having receiving confiscated animals from these facilities.
- This doesn’t count privately owned animals in places that aren’t USDA licensed. No, sadly, I can’t address the 10,000 backyard tigers claim. Yet.
I’m so glad this is finally published, because hell yes to hard data and informed advocacy.
The TL;DR for the results: Out of 2272 USDA-licensed or federally regulated exhibitors, 448 facilities in the United States have at least one big cat. In those facilities, there were records of a total of 4103 big cats. Here’s the breakdown of the number of individuals of each species:
@why-animals-do-the-thing this looks potentially dangerous for that cat. Is this okay, or an example of poor animal care?
This is absolutely unsafe for that cat. Even if the tigers can’t get a whole paw through the fence, they could still fatally injure the cat with just one of two claws connecting.
I’m not going to say it’s a bad example of animal care because the fence is adequate for the tigers (it’s primary containment, which simply keeps them in - it’s the secondary fencing that keeps people safe), and we have no way to know if that domestic cat is a pet or a stray. I certainly hope whomever took the photo immediately chased it off - that sort of situation often doesn’t end well for the smaller animals.
Hello. The zoo I am working with has been feeding extra salt to their big cats since forever. It is stated in this zoo's husbandry protocols that every adult cat (they have lions, tigers, clouded leopard) should be fed with 20 grams of salt per day. The keepers would usually rub the salt onto the meat before throwing it into the enclosures. I would like to ask if there exists any sound research / study that says please do not feed big cats with extra salt for ABCXYZ reason? Thank you!
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My contacts in the exotic animal nutrition world haven’t heard about big cats needing supplemental salt, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your zoo is doing something wrong. While general nutritional rules can apply in most cases, each zoo is going to modify their feeding to what the specific animals need. Unfortunately, the answer you’re looking for isn’t likely to be explicit in the published literature, because that’s not the sort of specific thing that would be studied (unless there was, for some reason, an indication there were problems that needed to be focused on - which as far as I can tell isn’t a thing). Figuring out how much salt they need and if the zoo is adding too much would take a huge literature review, as well as knowledge of the specifics of that zoo’s diet sources and prep. The practice of adding that much salt daily certainly sounds odd, but I can’t say anything about if it’s appropriate with such a limited amoutn of information - is there any way you can ask why they do it?
What have you been rolling in, you dirty thing? *casually flips nature’s furry meat grinder on its side in slippery pit* TSK you even got mud in your toes, what a naughty beast
i am so confused that the puma is tolerating this
has it even heard of pumas?
look at the squinty eyes, it’s enjoying a nice grooming. :3
Can’t get this kind of treatment in the wild, after all. All cats love luxury.
This is Messi, the “rescued” Russian cougar who was purchased from a zoo as a cub because “they wanted one” and now lives as a pet in a small apartment. I’ve written extensively about why his situation is unethical and unsafe - you can read that post here.
While this video does show him enjoying being washed, it’s crucial to realize that video content like this misrepresents a dangerous exotic animal as being as “easy to handle” as a regular domestic cat. That sort of image being shared absolutely does change people’s perceptions of wild animals, and results in people - and animals - getting injured or killed when they try to replicate those sorts of scenarios in their own lives. People watching this might not go out and try to wrestle a wild cat into their bathtub, but they might think it’s totally fine to approach a wild cougar for a photo or try to pet one through a fence at a zoo.
So while this video is cute, it does cougars in general huge disservice by perpetuating the idea that big cats act like pets and can be handled safely by regular people.
Have you heard about the tiger death at the London zoo, and if you have can you comment on it? I'm interested if the measures they took to familiarize the tigers to each other were standard and its just one of those things that happens sometimes or if the death could have been avoided if they had done something else?
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Yeah, absolutely. From all the available information, they did everything according to normal protocol and couldn’t have prevented this outcome.
Even in the wild, there’s always a risk of injury or death when tigers come together to mate. You’ve got not only a situation involving large, territorial predators who aren’t always on good terms (remember that male big cats will sometimes commit infanticide if they encounter females with young cubs), but a mating process that involves the male grabbing the female by the scruff and immobilizing her. If anything goes wrong - or even if the male just isn’t bold enough, or is too pushy for the female’s taste - it often ends in a fight.
The London Zoo had brought in a male Sumatran tiger from a zoo in Denmark as a prospective mate for their female, who had already successfully had multiple litters with a different male. They did introductions by scent first (keeping them next to each other), and then had them to “howdies” through a barrier: basically the equivalent of letting a new cat meet the resident one through a baby gate where they can touch but not actually get to each other directly except, y’know, with sturdier fencing. The statements given to the media said that they’d been “seeing the signs” that it was time to introduce them, which I think implies that the female was in heat, the new male was interested, and she was showing signs of being receptive. They allowed them access to each other without a barrier and… something they couldn’t have predicted happened. Without more information it’s not possible to know if the tigers were simply incompatible, or if something went wrong during an attempt at mating. Either way, the male severely injured the female, and there was nothing they could do for her by the time staff were able to separate them.
There’s one thing that was kind of weird about the story as the media reported it: that the male tiger had only been at the London Zoo for ten days. Now, generally there’s a quarantine period for new mammals coming into a facility (although it sounds like there are discussions in multiple countries about waving that period when the animal’s health history is entirely known). It’s not clear if he’d actually been out of quarantine for ten days - sometimes zoos don’t announce new animals until quarantine is over and they’re where the public can see them - or if the transport had occurred that recently. If he’d only been there for ten days, that’s kind of a short acclimatization period for him to a new situation and keepers and everything, and it’s possible that could have influenced his behavior. I don’t think it’s anything that we can point to and say ‘this caused it to happen’, though, because doing barrier-free introductions with rare and dangerous animals isn’t something zookeepers just have the freedom to decide to do. The choice to allow that interaction to occur - no matter if the cat had been there for ten days or a year - would have gone through multiple levels of supervisory approval, at which point you’ve got a lot of experienced professionals assessing the situation.
It’s awful, but that’s sort of a fact of life when it comes to tiger mating. You hear about something like this happening probably every couple of years in US zoos, no matter what lengths staff go to. There was a tigress in a zoo in Colorado who was killed a couple of years ago by a cat she’d been flirting with for weeks and had actually bred with successfully a couple of times earlier before the tragedy occurred. Social interactions between big cats are really a great example of why nature isn’t Disney, and tiger courtship is one of the most volatile situations possible. I’m sure the zoo did everything they could to set their cats up correctly, and unfortunately, just had really bad luck.
Here’s some good news for your day: snow leopards have been sighted again in the Khorkh mountains in Mongolia for the first time in nearly 30 years!
The area surveyed is a small, highly biodiverse sanctuary on the border of China. Snow leopard sightings used to be common, but since the 1990s, there hadn’t been any confirmed reports of their presence.
A new study by the Snow Leopard Trust, however, was the first time there’s been rangers and camera traps in Khorkh. According to the Snow Leopard trust, “we don’t have an unlimited number of cameras or trained field staff, so we have to select our study sites carefully. This is the first time we’ve been able to venture east into Small Gobi A Protected Area – thanks to the help of local rangers, whom we had trained in camera trapping techniques before the survey. The fact that we’ve been able to confirm the snow leopard’s presence here this quickly is encouraging.”
What’s even better is that the camera trap caught photos of multiple individuals, including a mother with young cubs.
But why are they… so rotund? I glanced at the picture and thought it was like bad taxidermy or something at first >_>
A combination of body proportions, super floof, and a bad camera angle.
Snow leopards are not super svelte like other big cats. They’re stockier with kind of wide bodies, for the purpose of heat conservation. You can see in this photo that they don’t have the “definition” of warmer-climate cats like tigers.
Add to that the fact that they’ve got the longest and thickest fur of any big cat species, and that they need to put on extra weight to survive the winter… and you get a pretty chunky-looking felid. You can see in the photo below that they can look fairly close to spherical when they’re resting or curled up on themselves.
We’re all fairly used to seeing photos of snow leopards that are either taken in the warmer part of the year, or ones from zoos. Summer coats make cats look less fluffy, and in captive settings, snow leopards don’t need to put on extra weight to prepare for a lean season. But you can see even from photos of snow leopards in human care that they’re still super fluffy animals. Here’s some babies from the LA Zoo - even in a warm climate, they’re still puffy and could easily look rotund if caught at a bad angle.
I think the last part of it is that the camera trap startled them, and you’re getting that cat reaction of ‘arch back and puff up at the scary thing’. Honestly, I’m really happy to see those snow leopards looking so round, because it means they’re healthy and well fed. It just definitely looks a little odd!
I asked on a zoo group for photos of snow leopards known to be in good body condition showing off their floof. This is only a small selection of the incredible photos provided in response. All of these cats are at a perfectly healthy weight for their age and growth stage.
Above is Bataar from Cape May County Zoo on the left, and Raj from Binder Park Zoo on the right. Both at great weights but fairly spherical when at rest. (Photo Credits: J. Berg and Zookeeper Bryan.)
The lovely lady below this text is Misha, from the Sacramento Zoo. You can see how even just sitting, a reproductive-age female snow leopard can look quite round. Directly below her is a group of snow leopards from Assiniboine Park in Manitoba (who I unfortunately don’t have names for) showing how common that aesthetic is for the species. (Photo Credits: M. Owyang and F. Donnelly)
Snow leopard cubs are super fluff when they’re little. The very fresh baby on the right was born at the Welsh Mountain Zoo in the UK, and was probably around two or theee months old when the photo was taken. The older cub on the right is Misha’s son, Coconut, when he was about nine months old. (Photo Credits: M. Rimmer and M. Owyang)
Even though snow leopards are super fluffy, it doesn’t mean their actual body under the coat is chunky. While they’re built a little more stocky than other big cats, they’re still very long when fully stretched out. Here’s Misha and Coconut again to demonstrate: on the left, Misha stands while Coconut sits on a rock; on the right, Misha is standing fully stretched out with her paws on a tree. (Photo Credits: M. Owyang)
And because no photoset of snow leopards would be complete without it, here’s some gratuitous tail from Princess at Tanganyika Wildlife Park. (Photo Credit: K. Randolph)
Here’s some good news for your day: snow leopards have been sighted again in the Khorkh mountains in Mongolia for the first time in nearly 30 years!
The area surveyed is a small, highly biodiverse sanctuary on the border of China. Snow leopard sightings used to be common, but since the 1990s, there hadn’t been any confirmed reports of their presence.
A new study by the Snow Leopard Trust, however, was the first time there’s been rangers and camera traps in Khorkh. According to the Snow Leopard trust, “we don’t have an unlimited number of cameras or trained field staff, so we have to select our study sites carefully. This is the first time we’ve been able to venture east into Small Gobi A Protected Area – thanks to the help of local rangers, whom we had trained in camera trapping techniques before the survey. The fact that we’ve been able to confirm the snow leopard’s presence here this quickly is encouraging.”
What’s even better is that the camera trap caught photos of multiple individuals, including a mother with young cubs.
But why are they… so rotund? I glanced at the picture and thought it was like bad taxidermy or something at first >_>
A combination of body proportions, super floof, and a bad camera angle.
Snow leopards are not super svelte like other big cats. They’re stockier with kind of wide bodies, for the purpose of heat conservation. You can see in this photo that they don’t have the “definition” of warmer-climate cats like tigers.
Add to that the fact that they’ve got the longest and thickest fur of any big cat species, and that they need to put on extra weight to survive the winter… and you get a pretty chunky-looking felid. You can see in the photo below that they can look fairly close to spherical when they’re resting or curled up on themselves.
We’re all fairly used to seeing photos of snow leopards that are either taken in the warmer part of the year, or ones from zoos. Summer coats make cats look less fluffy, and in captive settings, snow leopards don’t need to put on extra weight to prepare for a lean season. But you can see even from photos of snow leopards in human care that they’re still super fluffy animals. Here’s some babies from the LA Zoo - even in a warm climate, they’re still puffy and could easily look rotund if caught at a bad angle.
I think the last part of it is that the camera trap startled them, and you’re getting that cat reaction of ‘arch back and puff up at the scary thing’. Honestly, I’m really happy to see those snow leopards looking so round, because it means they’re healthy and well fed. It just definitely looks a little odd!
Here’s some good news for your day: snow leopards have been sighted again in the Khorkh mountains in Mongolia for the first time in nearly 30 years!
The area surveyed is a small, highly biodiverse sanctuary on the border of China. Snow leopard sightings used to be common, but since the 1990s, there hadn’t been any confirmed reports of their presence.
A new study by the Snow Leopard Trust, however, was the first time there’s been rangers and camera traps in Khorkh. According to the Snow Leopard trust, “we don’t have an unlimited number of cameras or trained field staff, so we have to select our study sites carefully. This is the first time we’ve been able to venture east into Small Gobi A Protected Area – thanks to the help of local rangers, whom we had trained in camera trapping techniques before the survey. The fact that we’ve been able to confirm the snow leopard’s presence here this quickly is encouraging.”
What’s even better is that the camera trap caught photos of multiple individuals, including a mother with young cubs.
I found your post about LSU’s tigers super informative! I’ve got a few friends that go there. I did have a question, though. From what they’ve told me, the tiger wasn’t “brought” to football games, but rather had free choice over whether or not he wanted to go. Is this true, or have the students themselves been misinformed?
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I honestly don’t know. I would guess that what was meant is that they offered him the change to get into the transport cage, potentially for reinforcement, and that he wouldn’t be forced if he chose not to. LSU has gotten so much negative attention for their tiger mascot from animal rights groups that their messaging has gotten a little garbled as they tried to reframe their practices (which weren’t necessarily bad in the first place) to more appropriate language.
The issue with taking a tiger to a sports game is less about if it’s voluntary for the tiger and more about a safety issue. While we can assume that the tiger probably didn’t find the experience too aversive if he continued to get into the transport cage (and truly wasn’t forced), it’s likely that the experience was still somewhat stressful for him. Dangerous predators + high energy situations + lots of hyped up college kids = just a bad, risky scenario all around.
I've really enjoyed reading your #CrouchingTigerHiddenData thread (excellent work). I know your research and data was mostly focused on exotic big cats, but I'm curious what you found/know about native big cats in private captivity. Obviously it's harder to gauge escapees when they're native species, and species like bobcat are smaller and easier to hide than tigers, but there seems to be either a growing or becoming less secret community locally of native big cat owners where I live (Montana).
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Thanks! That’s actually totally in line with the work I did. Cougars are considered big cats under federal law, and none of the specific laws that provide oversight / restriction on big cats exempt natives species. Bobcats are not legally considered to be big cats, and so I actually excluded them from the data I was looking at.
I don’t know about Montana’s wild cougar population specifically, but one of the things I was surprised to learn over the course of my research is that cougar populations are not only continuing to grow in the United States, but that they’ve actually been known to be recolonizing the Midwest for a couple decades. Most of what you find on google will only show you that cougars have an established range area west of the Rockies, but there’s definitely established populations in the Black Hills in South Dakota and lots of sightings are coming out of Nebraska and North Dakota lately.
It’s actually fairly easy to tell the difference between an escaped cougar and a wild cougar, even just looking at the data that I was able to get from the various lists and/or news articles. Pets generally were seen multiple times or for prolonged periods of time (they didn’t run with people in proximity), tended to be in more populated areas, and sometimes actively sought out people. There was one instance where one literally started scratching at someone’s front door. Wild cougars were generally only seen once (and generally not well enough to even be confidently identified), and tended to show up on the outskirts of a city or in the suburbs. Sometimes it was really obvious when they were a wild animal, like the female cougar who attacked a dog in a ten-street town in the Midwest a stone’s throw from a wildlife refuge a day before young cougar cubs were found. Other times it was less obvious: there was a male cougar hit by a car in New England who I assumed had to be a pet, but who was actually found through a DNA test to have dispersed from South Dakota. He’d been seen on camera traps travelling through Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New York in the prior months. It’s normal for young male cougars to disperse from the area they grew up in to find their own territories, and that’s thought to be why so many cougars are suddenly being sighted in unexpected places (although that one male did take an unusually long journey). Overall, I found 25 “escaped pet” sightings that were very likely to be cougars. In each of them, they were determined to be pets because local officials didn’t think that cougars showed up in those areas anymore - even though most of them were in areas of the Midwest where there have been documented cougar sightings for years!
Areas like Montana may be more likely to have people with hidden pet cougars, simply because it’s easier to get cubs when it’s a native species and because it’s easier to keep pet exotics secret in areas where you’ve got less population density. That being said, the data I was looking at didn’t show an increase in escapes or known pets in the state. One good metric is that if there’s not attention from HSUS or other organizations that advocate against exotic pets, what’s going on probably doesn’t involve exotic pets - right now, anything that could be used in the media to promote more laws prohibiting exotic pets will be taken advantage of. It’s entirely possible what you’ve heard of happening where you live is simply more sightings of wild animals that are being amplified by social media. I would guess the same is true for bobcats - although they’re definitely more common as an exotic pet than bigger cats - but that’s outside what I’ve studied.
This is always the academic piece of the #CrouchingTigerHiddenData work that I save for last when I’m telling the story, because it tends to make the most sense after we’ve looked at everything else. If you’re just coming into this discussion of my big cat research, the whole series can be found under the tag above. While many claims about big cat populations in the U.S. discuss all big cats and all states, there’s a very specific and pervasive myth that refers directly to two southern states and their tiger population.
The claim is repeated everywhere - from sanctuaries, animal advocacy groups, hell, I’ve even heard it repeated at the San Diego Zoo: “There are more tigers living in backyards in Texas and Florida than live in the wild in the rest of the world.” After all my research, I am very sure it’s not true.
We’ve already discussed that it’s very unlikely that there are multiple thousands of any type of big cat residing in the United States outside of zoo and sanctuary settings as of 2018/2019. The supposed number of big cats appears to have come about through what was essentially a very long game of telephone. It started with an academic claim of 5,000 tigers in the entire United States in 2005, and from there the number was repeated as a suspected estimate by academics and the media… but always with a caveat of “but there could be more, we don’t know.” This lead to a lot of suggested population ranges, because if there’s commonly known to be 5,000 in the entire country, there could be as many as 7,000 hidden ones! 7,000 then became 10,000 through the same process, and if that’s just the number of tigers, people started estimating how many big cats of all the other species put together might be out there. With very few journalists actually going through the effort to find the sources for what they were being told, we ended up with this idea of 10,000 big cats in the United States.
The idea of “more tigers in Texas than the wild” is actually far older than most of the big cat population estimates we hear - it’s just been very good at enduring without changing, unlike every other number claimed. The earliest source I can find for it comes from a Dallas Observer article from 2002, in which the author stated that “there is no official count yet, but those familiar with the issue claim that the tiger population in Texas is at about 4,000 animals, which, if accurate, would mean there are more tigers in the state than in India.” I reached out to the journalist about who his source was for that claim, but didn’t hear back. That piece was referenced in a journal article by the AZA’s “tiger guy” Ron Tilson in 2003 and implied to be a credible estimate. I haven’t been able to track how it progressed from the media from there, but it is likely that the same researcher’s statement in a major tiger conservation textbook in 2010 that “there are more captive tigers in the United states or China than in the wild” helped perpetuate it’s dominance within the captive big cat narrative.
We’ve talked in previous pieces in this series about how all the evidence available indicates that captive big cat populations in the United States have only declined since the year 2000. Census data as well as the number of incidents involving captive big cats all points towards a precipitous drop in the number of big cats in the country at all. The FCF census found only
2349 tigers in the entire United States in 2016, the vast majority of which were in zoos and sanctuaries. The last estimation of wild tiger populations was 3,890. If there were an estimated 4,000 tigers in all settings in Texas in 2002 (a number which has no source) it seems highly unlikely that the private sector would have grown so drastically that it alone would contain 4,000 tigers 17 years later, especially given that the zoo and sanctuary populations of tigers in the state are known to have dropped.
There aren’t that many tigers in the entire United States right now - there’s no way there’s such a high concentration in Texas, much less just in people’s backyards as pets.
While Texas does have one of the highest populations of tigers in the country, that number is still only 198. That includes all the tigers in zoos and sanctuaries. What about Florida? It appears to have been added to the state-based narrative because it historically had a very high population of tigers, and it does actually have the most tigers of any state in the U.S.: 498. The total number of tigers identified in those states three years ago was a little less than 700. Somehow, I don’t believe it’s likely there’a another 3,000 hidden somewhere in backyards in the state given all the evidence we’ve already reviewed in this series.
If you don’t believe me, look to the natural disasters for your evidence. In the last couple years, both Texas and Florida have gotten hit with major hurricanes that did a huge amount of property damage. Big cats aren’t easy to evacuate in the face of an impending disaster - especially if you’re trying to keep them secret. Even zoos shelter their dangerous animals in place when things like that happen. So we could reasonably assume that if there’s approximately 4,000 big cats in backyards between the two states, when a huge fraction of each state is hit with a hurricane that destroys fences and construction and leads to a ton of flooding, we should see at least one escaped or dead tiger, right? There wasn’t a single one. It’s not like the news would have kept that quiet - one of the biggest voices pushing for a federal bill restricting big cat ownership is a spokesperson for the national sheriff’s association, and one of his specific talking point is how dangerous pet big cats make emergency situations for first responders. If someone had found a tiger, alive or dead, it would have made national news. I actually spoke to a couple of people who helped with hurricane cleanup in those states, and they told me that the only tigers they ever encountered were known entities that were registered appropriately (i.e. tigers not considered part of the “thousands” living in backyards because they weren’t kept secret).
We’d know if the United States had that many tigers living in such a small area. A larger population of tigers highly concentrated in just a couple of states would result in very different data on attacks, escapes, and sightings than I’ve found in the course of my research. Even if there are more tigers than the 700 the FCF found, that’s still far lower than the population numbers claimed - and far less than the number of tigers found in the wild.
This data is interesting, but why should we care about it on a practical level? Stay tuned.
It’s been a while since we’ve talked about this on the blog, and I’m seeing questions pop up about it on #CrouchingTigerHiddenData posts, so let’s revisit it.
Generic tigers are those whose lineage is unknown, or whose ancestry is a mix of two or more subspecies. It’s a fancy word for “mutt” and it’s mostly an American term.
Bengal tigers in the United States are generally considered to be generic, because there was so much cross-breeding between subspecies (and so little record-keeping) during the early years of the zoo industry. Conservation breeding programs in the U.S. require participating animals to be purebreds, and AZA has focused their species survival programs (SSPs) on the rarer subspecies: Amur, Sumatran, and Malaysian.
Tigers without records proving their lineages are pure - a category which includes a lot of Bengals, and any tiger closely related to white tigers - were deemed useless to conservation by the AZA and wildlife authorities. That’s why they were removed from the Captive Bred Wildlife program in 1998: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t want to accidentally imply that their breeding served any conservation purpose. They added them back to the program in 2016 in order to provide equal oversight for all big cats in the U.S., not because it was suddenly decided they were useful for conservation programs.
There’s a lot of debate around generic tigers recently. Some people feel it’s immoral for anyone to breed generic tigers for any reason (including zoo exhibition) because they can’t contribute to conservation work. This is obviously a very contentious stance for zoos that are not AZA-accredited, because they’d like to be allowed to exhibit tigers and educate the public about tigers in general - and AZA generally won’t send valuable SSP megafauna outside their own networks, (They actually just made the criteria that non-AZA facilities wanting to partner with the SSPs must meet even more strict in 2018.) There’s also the fact that scientists keep changing how many tiger subspecies they recognize, which is important because some of the proposed subspecies designations might make some currently “generic” tigers no longer considered sub-species hybrids. On top of that, there’s also some people arguing that the genetic diversity found in the generic tiger population is potentially vital to future conservation efforts; this appears to be based on the assumption that tiger conservation efforts will eventually stop attempting to preserve specific subspecies in sacrifice to making sure we have any tigers left at all. I can’t say I’ve seen any published data yet to support that point, but as we look to the future - with all of AZA’s Tiger SSPs already in need of new founder stock and distinctly needing more places for tigers to go - there might be some wisdom in not blowing the idea off without least giving it some consideration.
Want to know more about captive big cat populations in the United States? All posts in this series are tagged “CrouchingTigerHiddenData”.
Why Animals Do The Thing is a two-part freelance animal science education effort! This tumblr blog hosts informal discussions about everything animals and encourages community discourse. The main website hosts in-depth articles on animal industry topics.
Rachel is an educator and animal science writer. With prior professional experience in zookeeping, visitor education, shelter behavior management, and more, she works to translate pertinent field-specific knowledge into comprehensive explanations about current animal related topics.
