Animals on the Loose

Dozens of exotic animals were released from their cages in Zanesville, Ohio, last night. The wolves, lions, tigers, bears, and other species were set free by the owner of a game park, who then committed suicide. Schools in the area were closed today, and law-enforcement officers were told to shoot to kill. Many of the escaped animals have since been shot dead.
In 1970, prompted by the news that a casqued hornbill had liberated itself from the Bronx Zoo, Susan Sheehan looked into the matter of zoo escapes and found that it was not an uncommon occurrence in New York (remember the cobra and the peacock from earlier this year?):

Not surprisingly, birds are the most common fugitives, but several varieties of monkeys have slipped out of their enclosures in the Bronx Zoo and so have beavers, otters, a pygmy hippopotamus, a Himalayan black bear, a leopard, and a platypus. Central Park’s roster of escapees includes a deer, a civet cat, and an Indian sun bear. Two black bear cubs have gone on the lam from the Prospect Park Zoo, in Brooklyn, and three chimpanzees (father, mother, infant) once got loose from Staten Island’s Barrett Park Zoo….The civet cat loped down Fifth Avenue to Bergdorf Goodman’s, where it tried unsuccessfully to enter the store first by the front door and later by the employees’ entrance; it was finally caught climbing up the store’s water pipes.

Sheehan acknowledged that while many zookeepers describe their animals’ quarters as escape-proof, “neither ingenuity nor diligence is required of animals set free by an act of man.”

More recently, Susan Orlean wrote about a tiger that walked through the township of Jackson, New Jersey, in 1999. When the tiger did not succumb to tranquilizer darts, it was shot dead by wildlife officials. Jackson, Orlean reveals, had, at that time, one of highest concentrations of tigers per square mile in the world. It was home to fifteen tigers at Six Flags Wild Safari and some two dozen more at the Tigers Only Preservation Society, owned by a woman named Joan Byron-Marasek. (Byron-Marasek’s compound was later shut down by the police and tigers relocated to Texas.)
Officials were unable to determine the dead tiger’s provenance, and Orlean points that it’s not hard to buy a tiger:

Only eight states prohibit the ownership of wild animals; three states have no restrictions whatsoever; and the rest have regulations that range from trivial to modest and are barely enforced. Exotic-animal auction houses and animal markets thrive in the Midwest and the Southeast, where wildlife laws are the most relaxed. In the last few years, dealers have also begun using the Internet. One recent afternoon, I browsed the Hunts Exotics Web site, where I could have placed an order for baby spider monkeys ($6,500 each, including delivery); an adult female two-toed sloth ($2,200); a Northern cougar female with blue eyes, who was advertised as “tame on bottle”; a black-capped capuchin monkey, needing dental work ($1,500); an agouti paca; a porcupine; or two baby tigers “with white genes” ($1,800 each). From there I was linked to more tiger sites—Mainely Felids and Wildcat Hideaway and NOAH Feline Conservation Center—and to pages for prospective owners titled “I Want a Cougar!” and “Are You Sure You Want a Monkey?” It is so easy to get a tiger, in fact, that wildlife experts estimate that there are at least fifteen thousand pet tigers in the country—more than seven times the number of registered Irish setters or Dalmatians.

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Cartoon by Mischa Richter.