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.
Man IDK like
I don’t judge people for how they deal with aggressive dogs anymore.
Until you have lived in a house with an aggressive dog that you love and adore and you understand the feeling of never knowing when that button’s gunna be pressed and when your beloved dog is going to go after someone or something again, until you have to worry about your dog grabbing someone’s dog or grabbing a kid on a driveby even with a muzzle on, until you have to hard choice of give up or keep trying because you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t either way… you can say all the nice words you want about only accepting this or that method for your dog, but you’ll never ever know what it’s like to be constantly second-guessing your failsafes and your management.
While many of my followers know the story of my first doberman already, there are various ones of you who don’t and that’s because I was judged VERY harshly for the choice I made with him and didn’t feel like dealing with that again on a blog dedicated to Creed.
For those who do not know, December 15 2012 I met the best dog ever and his name was Skoll. He had been born Salem, then Simba, then Caesar, and finally Skoll when he came to me. He was 2.5 years old and I was his 4th home if we don’t count the near half-year he spent in boarding in foster care.
Skoll’s first owner was a dude who wanted him as a guard for the trailer of his truck. His second owner was a dude who thought he wanted an undersocialized undertrained mess in a 1br apartment. His third owner was a horse farm that kept him as an outdoor dog and was using the help of his breeder and the IPO club she attended to “manage his issues”.
I put that in quotes because both home and breeder were kicked out of the IPO club for overly harsh treatment of their dogs. You know it’s bad when a sport that almost requires (in many clubs, including this one) aversive trainings says you’re being too aversive and you can’t come anymore.
On paper I have confessions to:
- putting a prong around his muzzle and yanking upwards when he barked at dogs or people
- cranking a professional-grade e-collar all the way up, chasing him down with continuous high stim until he was cornered, continuing to stim through this until he “voluntarily surrendered” and rolled over. for countersurfing.
- hanging him with a prong
- beating him with various objects
- hanging him with a choke- specifically a leerburg style “dominant dog collar”
- stomping on his feet for correct heeling position
- stomping on his feet for barking at dogs/people
And various other petty things that I am frankly too upset to go dig up his papers and read off right now.
I also have words from the IPO club they trained at, and the reasons they were kicked out, and how it was a majority vote by most members and the person who contacted me after Skoll’s death had been watching his journey with me because she knew him and was of the opinion that he should have been euthanized as he was unsaveable at point of surrender due to their harsh treatment making his dog/human reactivity much, much worse than it needed to be. She, and other club members, declined giving me names of either breeder or home, however. I suppose they wanted to stay out of it and not take sides.
From the story the 3rd home wrote, it sounds like he had some minor reactivity as a young, intact, 1.5 year old male doberman. That’s a punk stage for the breed and one I’m expecting Creed to hit when he’s that old too. Either due to his bad breeding (which both foster mom and IPO club were not impressed by his pedigree), crappy start on life, that third home, or a combination of all three, he crashed within 6 months to be much much MUCH worse than when he’d started.
And they gave him a behavior which he practiced many times. If I bite the human, the stim turns off. If I get hit with a prong, just bite the human and they will not hit me again. If the e-collar shocks me, bite the human and they’ll release the button. After several attacks during “training” onto his owners, they tossed him at a vet clinic to do whatever they wanted with him… which is when he entered foster care.
pawsitivelypowerful, who was my friend at the time (and still is!), knew I was looking for a doberman that I could work and have some fun in obedience maybe with. She also knew that I’m not a stranger to aggressive dog cases, though neither of us realized just how bad Skoll was at that point. Due to the incomplete story told by the third home (as I got the rest of the story from the IPO club much later), his foster mom also was not aware of how ongoing of an issue this was with him. I contacted her, wrote a literal 10 page essay on my previous dog experience and why I thought I was a good home, sat through an hour-long phone interview with her, sat through an hour-long phone interview with the trainer she had assess him, got a home check, sat through another hour-long phone interview…
And FINALLY on December 15th 2012, I made the 14hr drive up to Buffalo, NY to pick up my dog.
And all of us quickly discovered that Skoll’s issues were deeper than “just don’t use positive punishment, that’s the trigger”. A lot deeper.
Skoll was fear aggressive, dog aggressive, human aggressive, completely unsafe around small animals (despite testing well onleash with cats), with high levels of anxiety and a whole ton of drive that he had absolutely no idea what to do with. He was OCD and had pica. He was a resource guarder. He was vWD affected and became enraged whenever a small cut or scratch- a non-bleeding superficial wound on a regular dog- would suddenly start gushing blood. He redirected his frustration and aggression onto every- and anyone. For whatever reason he was terrified of urine and feces and would cower as soon as he saw them but god forbid I go to pick them up because then he would guard them. If someone yelled, if someone raised their hand, if someone seemed angry, he would cower… but if they came toward him he would launch.
Once, he saw a leaf fall out of a tree and became obsessed with the absolute NEED to inspect and when he hit the end of the leash lunging at it he turned around and came right back up the leash at my face. His triggers changed often and usually without rhyme or reason. Our trainer could be working with him and he would greet her like she was his best friend, she would leave and come back and he would launch himself towards her face with full intention to bite, then turn around and launch at me with full intention to bite me once he hit the end of the leash. Leave and come back and OH HEY FRIEND FANCY SEEING YOU HERE I LOVE YOU. She is experienced with doberman and specifically aggressive doberman and told me in private that she had never seen a case as bad as him in the 40 years she’s been in the breed. He could see a squirrel on a mailbox and whine and chatter because I wasn’t going to let him chase the squirrel, go by that same mailbox on a walk later that day and THE MAILBOX MUST DIE JUST IN CASE THE SQUIRREL IS STILL THERE. And the next walk, oh? there was a mailbox there? I didn’t notice.
This dog had problems.
I worked him every single day. Skoll was a dog that loved to work for the simple sake of working. “YES!” was the only thing he needed to hear to get excited about training. I swear, if Creed has half the work ethic of Skoll, then he indeed will go far. If Skoll was not so out of control, he would have made one HELL of an obedience dog. He was flashy, he was controlled, he was fast… until you pressed that button, and then good luck getting him to stop trying to seek and destroy whatever it was that turned him on in the first place.
In the short time I had him, his obedience and manners improved immensely. His health improved immensely. His focus improved immensely. The triggers that were visible, the ones that stayed still and didn’t jump all over the place, those we could work with and he was making SO many strides. But then something would change, and suddenly something that had been okay 100 times before HAD TO DIE and I was stuck figuring out what the hell it even could have been in the first place.
A lot of behaviorists like to describe dogs like Skoll as having demons. After having Skoll, I can see why. This was a lot more than I had ever dealt with. The dog aggressive BBM, the human aggressive chow, the dog-and-human aggressive GSD, those were nothing compared to the unholy force that drove Skoll forward when he zeroed in on something to murder even if there was nothing there anymore. There was no squirrel on that mailbox anymore, but because it was there 3 hours ago, he has to kill the mailbox and the air around it just in case.
Skoll attacked me 4 times. The first 3 was with clear trigger and I chalked them up to a learning experience. In my defense, the first 3 happened within a week of him coming home and were the basis of everyone’s realization that he was waaaaaaaay worse than what all of us had thought. The last time was the second-to-last day I had him.
He was laying down and I wanted to see something in my closet. I was an art student and my closet in that apartment had my drawing papers in it, and he was in the way. I patted him on the bottom, called his name to let him know I was behind him. He sort of glanced back but didn’t move. Normal. He did that all the time. I went to pet his head, something he had sought from me in the past and something that had NEVER been a trigger for him. He had a momentary stiffen and as I pulled my hand back I knew. I was going to get nailed.
And he did bite me. He roared, he came at me, he grabbed my hand with his whole mouth… and then he stood there looking at me. He didn’t shake. He didn’t let go either. I’d yelped and my roommates had come running, I told them to stay out of my room for fear that he would go after them once he released me.
Slowly but surely something clicked behind his eyes and he let go. Dropped to a grovel and crawled slowly to his crate where he huddled against the back of it shaking.
I conferred with his trainer, his foster mom, her trainer, my friends, my vet… and we all came to the same conclusion.
February 15th 2013, I said goodbye to the best dog ever. I had him exactly two months but it felt so, so much longer.
And I was SO ANGRY. I was SO ANGRY for SO LONG. Skoll was an AWESOME dog and now he is gone. Who the hell would breed a dog this screwed up and sell it to someone to fall in love with and have to say goodbye like this? Who the hell would screw a dog up so bad using shitty training and then toss him aside like he’s a worthless broken toy? Who the hell would be so callous to continue breeding knowing this dog came from them and not care where he ended up?
I felt so guilty. Could I have done something else? Was I wrong to euthanize him? Maybe he was just having a bad day? Am I making a big deal of this and shouldn’t be? Would he be happier in another home? Could I accept the liability of him biting yet another person, here there or anywhere?
I searched his microchip- Skoll was born in Canada and sold as a purebred, so he was required to be chipped and registered with the CKC. His chip led in a big circle back to nothing. I contacted his foster mom but though she knows the pedigree she does not know the exact name of who produced him. I put a plea out on my doberman forum for anyone who might have information, and that is when the people from the IPO club he had attended contacted me.
A few months after I read @prairiegsds’ story on Bosco. I realized that there are some dogs that are helped by aversive training, provided it’s… sensible… and not the torture that Skoll experienced.
I don’t judge anyone for how they deal with their aggressive dog. Whether they stay in +R or if they use +P. Whether they euthanize or not. Whether they keep their dog at home or take their dog in public. I can’t. Not after feeling the helplessness that I felt when I knew I would have to euthanize Skoll. If +P had been an option for us, I would have done it. I would have done anything to keep Skoll alive.
Because I did not wait the 10 day quarantine I was supposed to, and euthanized him before that time was up, my state requires a mandatory autopsy and rabies check even if your dog is UTD on shots. Skoll had absolutely nothing detectable wrong with him. No thyroid issues. No visible heart problems. No tumors in his brain. Nothing besides vWD. I’ve had a couple people suggest rage syndrome but it doesn’t matter anymore. He is dead and has been dead for nearly two years. And it doesn’t ever stop hurting. Even after the death threats and suicide wishes stopped, it doesn’t stop hurting.
Until you have lived with a dog like that, until you have weighed your options with a dog like that, I really don’t think it’s your place to say yes or no on the subject of how to rehabilitate them. Not all dogs train the same… and I won’t knowingly judge someone stuck between a rock and a hard place with a dog they are desparate to save.
This is so important. Read it. All of it. Don’t be a slacker.
Wow, this got dug up from the abyss. Very early into my having Creed, long before Creed hit that aforementioned punk stage and my mentor and I used a prong collar and behavioral modification to teach him not to perform the dangerous behaviors he was performing. I was so afraid I’d fuck Creed up like Skoll had been.
Creed is now older than Skoll ever got. It was a sobering birthday for me, the day Creed turned 3, because Skoll was just shy of his 3rd birthday. Sometimes it shocks me that I was able to start again with a dog that wasn’t fucked up from birth- that I’m allowed to be happy with the dog I have now, that I don’t need to worry that my dog is going to bite someone- or me- just for walking by or touching him. Creed does not obsess like that. Creed does not zero in on something with a vengeance. Creed is controllable, tamable, manageable in his drive.
Creed is STABLE. And Skoll wasn’t. And that’s the difference.The more I see and experience the less I am convinced that there is one right answer for everything. I have seen some aggressive dogs for whom using aversives in their training and behaviour modification was incredibly helpful. I have seen others that would not be appropriate for.
Cookie cutter dog training does not exist.
