July 2012 Carole presented this at the Taking Action for Animals conference in Washington, D.C.

One person can be the cat-alyst for change. If you are sitting in this audience, YOU might be the kind of person who has the passion to overcome the impossible in order to help save thousands, or millions of animals. Rose Church is one of those people.

How many of you have heard about Tony the tiger who has been kept at a Louisiana truck stop for the past decade?

How many of you have heard of, or recognize Ian Somerhalder from the Vampire Diaries?

Ian Sommerhalder

Rose Church is a pro bono attorney for the Ian Somerhalder foundation and she wanted to get Ian involved in freeing Tony the tiger. Ian has 2,300,000 followers on Twitter and she thought that getting him to Tweet about Tony might help raise awareness about Tony the truck stop tiger. She contacted me to ask what Ian could ask his followers to do.

Even though we get more complaints about Tony than any other single situation and have been working to free him for the past decade, we had exhausted our ability to do anything. We had hired the tiger a lawyer and had shown up with plenty of supporters to testify, but it had become obvious that the state of Louisiana was not going to do anything. USDA has revoked the license to display the tiger, but that rarely seems to stop exhibitors from exhibiting.

The ALDF (Animal Legal Defense Fund) had continued the fight in the only venue left, which was the legal system. Court cases wind their way through the system like a river of molasses so there wasn’t much anyone could do. It seemed like the whole world already knew about Tony, so having Ian Tweet his audience didn’t seem like a terribly productive thing to do. If we had the help of a celebrity we told Rose that he could make a far great impact for thousands of tigers like Tony by educating his fan base about the issue that causes so many tigers and other big cats to end up being bred, exploited and discarded.

The underlying cause for almost all of this suffering is cub petting.

I explained to Rose that it was big business in the U.S. for breeders to charge the public to pet or pose with big cat cubs. One claims to have made $23,000 in a single weekend at a mall, charging people to have interaction with the cubs and / or have their photos made with the cubs. The breeders and dealers were doing these pay to play sessions with older lions and tigers up until the death of a high school student named Haley Hildebrand.

Thanks to pressure from the media and then the public, the USDA issued a FAQ sheet suggesting that cubs under 8 weeks should not be used this way. In a separate appellate court case the judge ruled that cubs over the age of 12 weeks were too dangerous for such interaction. The unintended result was creating a loophole whereby breeders could still charge customers to touch cubs who were between 8-12 weeks old. That resulted in massive breeding in order to have profitable cubs to use. Since their shelf life was only 4 weeks, breeders decided to produce lion and tiger cubs every month so that they would always have “legal” age cubs to use.

Rose could hardly believe her ears. First of all, she had never seen these mall exhibits where tiger breeders set up shop and offer cubs as photo props all day over a four day weekend. Second, she couldn’t believe that USDA hadn’t done something to close that 4 week window they had created.

It can be anything from fixing a broken toy to curing some social ill; have you ever had one of those moments where you see a situation and think to yourself, “I can fix this.” This was Rose’s moment. She said to herself, “I can do something about this!”

Rose figured there at LOTS of animal protection groups out there and if they all worked together they could fix this thing. But, she doubted that anyone would listen to her if she made the suggestion that they do so. She took the information to her professor from Law School, Diane Sullivan because she knew that Dean Sullivan had her own animal law television show and a lot of clout in the animal protection community. She figured that if Dean Sullivan were to ask the big animals groups to come together that it might actually happen.

Rose asked me who the big players are that care about tigers. That was an easy question because I had been part of a team of more than 40 such organizations who worked together as the International Tiger Coalition. The ITC had been formed primarily to end the tiger farming in China, but time and again the hurdle was that China would resist our suggestions by pointing out the fact that the U.S. doesn’t even know how many tigers we have nor where they are nor how they are being housed. I gave her the names and contact info for the people who I felt had been most involved in the ITC and who could work well together.

Rose contacted IFAW, the International Fund for Animal Welfare and went over the list to get further input on who would be willing to work together on the tiger issue. The result was a round table meeting in D.C. at IFAW in July 2011. At the table were the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Humane Society of the United States, Born Free, the World Wildlife Fund, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the Wild Cat Conservation Legal Aid Society, World Council for Animal Rights, the Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law, Ian Somerhalder Foundation, the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries and Big Cat Rescue. Combined we represent more than 18 million supporters.

I’ve been a part of other animal welfare coalitions but this group has worked better together than anything I’ve ever seen before. The meeting was hugely successful and we got to the root of the tiger problem: cub petting. In your conference bags you will find a four page summary of the Tiger Handling Crisis. There is another page of citations used for the document that we are providing online at BigCatLaws.com

What the group concluded was that we can’t save wild tigers as long as there is such unregulated trade in captive tigers who provide a legal smoke screen for illegal activities such as poaching. China has made the argument that they should be allowed to farm tigers for their parts to fill the demand, but there will always be a demand for the “real” tiger; the “wild” tiger and expanding the market through farming tigers will only result in them being exterminated more quickly in the wild.

Right now there are more tigers in back yard cages in America than are left in the wild. It is thought that there are less than 3200 tigers left in the wild and at last count, by USDA, there were about 5000 tigers in USDA facilities. Only about 200 of those are AZA zoos, so the rest are in roadside zoos, circus acts, and back yards; and that is just the ones who voluntarily reported and who hold USDA licenses. For those who are not licensed by USDA, the people who own them as pets, there has been no census done.

As the group looked at the situation in the U.S., it became apparent that the number one cause for so many tigers to end up in deplorable conditions was the very lucrative cub petting industry. Two factors made this abuse possible.

Back in the 1980s white tigers became all the rage. White tigers would sell for $60,000 because the public was so enamored with seeing this freak of nature. What the zoos kept quiet was the fact that the only way to create that white coat was through purposely inbreeding, father to daughter, mother to son and brother to sister. Over time the cubs became more and more genetically impaired, suffering from club feet, open spines, crossed eyes and badly formed bones and teeth. Before long the Bengal tigers were so inbred that they were no longer reproducing or cubs were being born dead. But the public demanded to see white tigers, so the zoos started hybridizing Bengal tigers and Siberian tigers to continue the inbreeding a few generations more.

So many zoos and backyard breeders were cross breeding tigers that the USFWS decided it wasn’t worth their time to process the captive bred wildlife permits that are required for endangered species, so they created the “generic” tiger loophole. What this did was allowed zoos and private owners to breed non purebred tigers with no oversight and the tiger population exploded in the U.S.

The other factor that made it so easy for tigers to be bred and used as photo and petting props was that even though USDA had inadvertently created a four week window, between 8 and 12 weeks when cubs could be petted by the public, they had no way to enforce it because they do not require any sort of registration of tigers and rely almost entirely on what the tiger owner tells them as to the age of the cub or why the cub was taken from their mother. The same person who claims to make over $20,000 in a good weekend at the mall had 23 tiger cubs die over the span of just a little over a year, but to date the USDA has done nothing about it.

So, the coalition decided on a three prong approach to ending the abuse of tigers:

Close the generic tiger loophole at the USFWS

Ask USDA to close the 4 week window of cub petting

A federal bill that ends the breeding and trade in big cats outside of AZA zoos

Only a year has passed since one person arranged for a bunch of animal protection groups to work on this and we have good news so far:

The USFWS has put the suggestion of closing the generic tiger exemption out on the Federal Register for public comment and more than 14,000 commented in favor of doing so. The rule hasn’t been made final, but the government moves slowly.

We met with USDA, presented the Cub Handling Crises flier you have, along with the citations and the concurrence of 20 zoo vets who agree that cub petting should be banned. Unfortunately, the USDA has taken the position that they do not have the power to close the window. They made it; they should be able to close it, but they are unwilling, so we are still working on that one. For the most part their attitude seems to be that they don’t think it is a big enough problem because they don’t hear about it much. With your help we can fix that!

I've been writing my story since I was able to write, but when the media goes to share it, they only choose the parts that fit their idea of what will generate views. If I'm going to share my story, it should be the whole story. The titles are the dates things happened. If you have any interest in who I really am please start at the beginning of this playlist: http://savethecats.org/

I know there will be people who take things out of context and try to use them to validate their own misconception, but you have access to the whole story. My hope is that others will recognize themselves in my words and have the strength to do what is right for themselves and our shared planet.

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Music (if any) from Epidemic Sound (http://www.epidemicsound.com) This video is for entertainment purposes only and is my opinion.