You’re always allowed to have an opinion. I’m not going to tell you that you’re not allowed to feel what you feel about something, especially how an animal is treated. Even if everything in a given situation is fine, if it still makes you uncomfortable, I’m not going to tell you that your internal reaction is bad.
With regards to Grumpy Cat, you’re not really alone. I don’t know a lot about her, honestly, but I’ve had quite a surprising number of people drop me notes about the fact that they weren’t a fan of various things. Most commonly, people are expressing that they weren’t comfortable with a cat that had chronic / reoccurring health issues traveling to cons a lot and being in loud, noisy spaces with so many people while there.
There’s no judgement to pass on this one for me. I didn’t follow her story while she was alive, and we’ll never have all the information that her humans used to make their decisions about her daily life. She’s no longer alive, and while people are grieving isn’t the time to really dig into theoretical ethics / welfare impacts of previous choices. Most importantly, while we’re acknowledging those feelings, we also need to be sure to note that her owners did everything they needed to do with regards to treating the UTI that eventually claimed her life. Animal management choices that doesn’t come off right isn’t inherently abusive, or bad, or negligent - it can just be kinda uncomfortable sometimes, and if you feel that way, that’s fine.
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.
At the Zoological Association of America annual conference in 2017, there was a presentation about dangerous animal statistics that gave me an idea. An analysis of “code red” issues presented had identified tigers as the animal most frequently involved in safety incidents in zoos: if we used that knowledge and the number of tigers in zoos as a baseline, we could probably compare it to the number of safety incidents that were happening with the privately owned (pet) big cats to get a sense of how many of them there were. (If you’re just encountering this giant research project, you’ll find the full story under the tag “CrouchingTigerHiddenData”.)
At the time, this didn’t seem like a huge research project; after all, there were multiple animal advocacy groups who maintained databases tracking things involving big cats that affected public safety. The problem was that it was really hard to work with their information, because it was all maintained in long-form chronological lists. So, naively, I decided the best solution was to spreadsheet them, and then graph it! I embarked on typing up all of the information about data point within each of the four major sets of records, covering data going back 18 years. It turned out that took a hell of a lot longer than I expected, because some of the databases weren’t internally consistent, and none of them contained all of the same data that the others did. Because most of the incident reports appeared to have been pulled from news reports, a lot of the time a single incident would be recorded as occurring on different dates or even in different counties across the different databases. By time I’d finished removing redundancy from my data-set and making sure all the data I was looking at fell within the relevant parameters of the study (it happened in the U.S, it involved a “big cat” as defined by the Captive Wildlife Safety Act, human safety was actively at risk) I was left with 359 incidents that had occurred during 2000 - 2018. Then, the graphing began.
At the end of the project, I was left with a bunch of visuals that did not represent what I’d expected going into the project. The organizations whose databases I pulled from generally use their incident data to claim that there are still major, frequent safety issues in the United States due to the privately owned population of big cats - but what my graphs appeared to indicate was that the number of times privately owned big cats escaped, injured, or killed someone had actually dropped markedly over a decade ago and stayed low ever since. The more I studied the compiled data set, the more it became clear that the only explanation for the major decrease in safety incidents involving big cats in private settings was that the population of big cats in that setting had also dropped drastically. I was blown away, because, I had yet again found data that indicated the exact opposite of the conventional wisdom about pet big cat populations in the United States.
The full set of graphs is in the linked article, but let’s just take a look at some of the interesting highlights. Here’s what the total number of incidents looked like when broken down by the setting they occurred in:
The type of setting with the most total safety incidents involving big cats during the study period was actually zoos. While that might be off-putting at first glance, when I broke it down by who got hurt in zoos and what actually happened, there were two trends: as I learned in that presentation last year, big cats are the taxon that most frequently hurts or kills their keepers, and the majority of guest injuries at zoos either came from issues at shady facilities (this was more common in the early 2000s), or because people crossed barriers to try to pet things (more of the recent incidents). So, unless you work directly with the the big cats at a zoo, you’re going to be safe from the big cats as long as you respect the signs that say “do not cross” and keep your fingers to yourself.
Incidents in private non-professional settings (basically, pets, but for the purposes of a formal study this type of ownership was categorized as a situation where there is no business objective for having the cats) were the second most frequent type. That’s expected - the United States absolutely did have a problem with privately owned big cats escaping and attacking people for a while. But what’s important to do is view that in context with how frequent those incidents were over time.
When I compared the number of incidents over time in each setting, a pretty clear trend emerged: in the early 2000s, there were a ton of issues with big cats held in private settings. After the Captive Wildlife Safety Act passed in 2003, restricting interstate transport of big cats (commercial trade across state lines had been illegal for 30 years already), that number started to drop sharply. As more and more states and municipalities started to pass laws in the late 2000s prohibiting or severely restricting big cat ownership, the number of incidents involving privately owned big cats became lower than ever. There’s been less than 5 incidents a year involving privately owned cats since 2008, and less than three a year since 2013. In 2018, no database I utilized recorded even a single incident caused by a “pet” big cat.
In contrast, zoos had incidents involving big cats with pretty regular frequency across the entire period studied. That lines up with the data that was presented in 2017, but it’s worth reiterating what that indicates: that no matter how stringent your safety protocols, how professional your construction, or how much training staff receives, there is always an inherent risk to close proximity with big cats over time. It is highly probable that when big cats exist in any setting, things will happen.
An interesting outlier in the data, nicely visible on the graph above, is the year 2008. It was a really bad year for everyone - incident rates spiked in almost all settings, but there weren’t any obvious trends in the data that hinted at what might have been responsible for that. I’ve spit-balled a few explanations, but I haven’t found anything concrete to support any possible theory yet.
When we graph the total incidents each year in terms of what species was involved, the results are fairly predictable. Tigers caused a majority of all of the incidents, followed next by cougars and lions. This mirrors what is known about the demographics of big cat populations in the United States: tigers are the most common species of big cat in all settings, with lions second and cougars third. It makes sense that cougars caused more issues than lions, as people are generally more careful around lions due to their size, and more likely to underestimate or go into a cage with an adult cougar.
It’s probable that this graph, along with a number of others, is actually skewed towards cougars. There were quite a number of times over the 18 years assessed when a big cat was sighted loose in a neighborhood - just once, never again - and determined to be an escaped exotic pet by the authorities because they assumed there were no resident wild felids in the area. At least 25 of those instances were likely to have been transient cougars or other larger native felids, such as bobcats; it turns out cougars have been recolonizing the Midwest since the 1990s, and have been sighted far east of where most people assume their current range is. Some of the sightings included in the data set were obviously wildlife, such as the female cougar who attacked a dog in a tiny town right next to a wildlife refuge the day before two young cubs were found, and some were less obvious. Most spectacularly, an adolescent male cougar who was hit by a car in Connecticut - who obviously seemed like he had to be an escaped pet - was identified as a known individual from a population in South Dakota. He had been seen on camera traps travelling across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New York since he dispersed from his natal range, and his identify was confirmed without a doubt through a DNA test. (If you want to see how the cougar data modifies the conclusions, click through the link above to the full analysis).
Let’s look back at the incident data from zoos and private ownership settings top end this piece of the story, because there’s something very important I noticed during my analysis. Here’s a comparison of the frequency of different outcomes between the two settings.
People to get hurt or killed by big cats in zoos far more frequently than they do in private ownership settings. That’s because the vast majority of incidents involving privately owned cats were escapes, not attacks. Which isn’t exactly the narrative we’re told about the problems with captive big cats - it’s generally implied to the public that these privately owned big cats are attacking people left and right.
As further emphasis, here’s the graph dealing with people who get killed by big cats. It looks scary until you realize the sample size for an 18 year period is 15. In 18 years, across all settings - and during what’s been considered a massive crisis regarding dangerous animals - only 15 people died. The majority of whom, as the graph shows, either owned the animals that killed them or were employed as a zookeeper to care for them.
Three of those deaths happened in private ownership settings, including the two children under 13 who died during the study period. Two more occurred in “closed compounds”, a facility category which is often lumped into private ownership by advocacy groups. Even combined, only 1/3 of the deaths that occurred because of big cats were due to the the ones kept privately. Everyone else who was killed by a big cat from 2000 - 2018 was in a zoo or sanctuary setting, and most of them were staff or volunteers.
I emphasize this not to be morbid or to imply that a low number of deaths doesn’t matter, but because the raw data doesn’t match the way these statistics are normally presented to the public. Danger to minors is frequently presented as one of the driving forces for creating new regulations and legislation to do with privately owned big cats - stories of children being mauled or paralyzed or killed are repeated until it feels like something that happens all the time. But when you look at the data, over 18 years, only 32 minors (5 teenagers and 27 children 12 and under) have been injured; only half of those occurred in what are generally considered to be “private ownership” settings. Given the frequency with which professional, trained zookeepers are injured or killed by the big cats they work with - 95 incidents in 18 years, given only a maximum population of about 2,000 big cats spread between all zoos - having only 32 incidents in 18 years where children were hurt or killed when the alleged population in that setting is at least five times higher than the zoo population? If the numbers are low, that’s an incredibly low rate of incidents give the number of cats. That is not to say that there is ever an acceptable number of children getting hurt or killed by dangerous animals, but to note that something in the parameters of the assumed situation doesn’t add up correctly. Given that children are not likely to behave like trained, professional animal care staff around giant fuzzy kitties, it’s again much more likely that the low rate of injury to children by big cats in private settings recently is simply because there really aren’t that many big cats in private settings anymore.
That conclusion is borne out by research that reveals there really aren’t very many people breeding big cats outside of conservation programs in the United States anymore, and that when big cats move around the country illicitly, it’s very visible and the origin of the cats is very easy to identify. That’s a story for the next post.
