If you live in one of five states with no laws preventing the private possession of dangerous wild animals, there’s no telling what kind of safety threats are looming in your own neighborhood. Dozens of Milwaukee residents reported seeing a lion running loose, spurring a media frenzy this week. One blurry image captured on video in a resident’s backyard suggests this could be a young male or adult female African lion. People are so fearful and on edge that one man mistakenly shot and injured a pit bull dog, thinking it was the lion.
It shouldn’t take a tragedy before Wisconsin, and the other remaining holdout states of Alabama, Nevada, North Carolina, and South Carolina, enact common-sense laws to prevent reckless people from putting entire communities at risk by keeping dangerous wild and exotic pets.
It’s astonishing, but in some cases, even deaths and catastrophic injuries resulting from captive wild animal attacks have not moved legislators to protect residents. It’s still legal to keep a pet tiger in North Carolina, even after two separate incidents in which a 10-year-old boy was mauled to death by his uncle’s 400-pound pet tiger and a three-year-old boy was critically injured and left permanently blind after his father’s pet tiger crushed his skull.
It’s been three years since two chimpanzees escaped from a backyard cage in a residential Las Vegas neighborhood, yet Nevada still has no law. Police responded to that incident with more than 20 squad cars, diverted motorists away from the area, and warned residents to stay indoors. The chimpanzees ran amok, climbed into cars, pounded on vehicles, and banged on windows of homes. In order to protect the public, police shot and killed the male chimpanzee when he darted toward a crowd of onlookers.
Captive wild and exotic animals have unique and extremely complex needs that are difficult, if not impossible, for individuals to provide. Many of these animals are long-lived species and end up being discarded or released by people who were unprepared to provide decades of costly care. These animals pose a danger not only to their owner, but to children living in the household, visitors, neighbors, and emergency responders such as firefighters, paramedics, and police.
It never turns out well for the animals, and it’s often the taxpayers and nonprofit sanctuaries that bear the burden of paying costs related to escapes, attacks, and neglect cases that are all too often the predictable outcomes when these animals are kept in private hands.
While there are gaps in the state laws, there are problems at the federal level too. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has not yet finalized a rule on “generic tigers,” meaning that private individuals and roadside menageries can keep and breed these animals without the same record-keeping and standards required for professional accredited zoos with conservation breeding programs. The U.S. Department of Agriculture allows the public to have direct physical contact with big cats, primates, and other dangerous wild animals dragged around to shopping malls and put on display for paid photo ops, but is considering an HSUS legal petition to close that loophole.
We hope the situation in Milwaukee is resolved with no deaths or injuries and it triggers state lawmakers to finally ban the private possession of wild and exotic animals. Legislation has previously been introduced and the time to put an end to this dangerous trade is now.
If you live in one of the other states—Alabama, Nevada, North Carolina, or South Carolina—please urge your state legislators to take action and make it a top priority to end the private possession of dangerous wild animals. They shouldn’t wait until the next mauling or fatal attack takes place because of someone’s reckless behavior.
