Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (5 page)

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Authors: Lynn Waddell

Tags: #History, #Social Science, #United States, #State & Local, #South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), #Cultural, #Anthropology

BOOK: Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles
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of colorful, wild, yet friendly animals. With the right touch, they could

even be tamed.

In the early 1920s, Carl Fisher, the father of Miami Beach, brought

in elephants to help sell his newly developed coastline as the Riviera of

America. His favorite, Rosie, was photographed giving children rides

to an Easter egg hunt, dancing with a flapper, and even caddying for

President Warren Harding. The images made newspapers around the

country.

By the 1930s, the common man was able to walk among the ma-

caques at Monkey Jungle. Soon afterward, other stand-alone animal

attractions such as Clyde Beatty’s Jungle Zoo, Parrot Island, and the

proof

Miami Serpentarium dazzled the public with animal acts and the han-

dling of creatures that could kill near instantly with one bite.

Roadside zoos became as much a part of the Florida tourist experi-

ence as riding a wave. You could see monkeys jockey greyhounds, par-

rots perform card tricks, and an Asian elephant water-ski. Florida’s

natural wonders—Ty-D-Bol blue springs and orchid-filled botanical

gardens—became more surreal with captive wild beasts from the other

side the globe. Operators of gas stations and tourist huts along routes

to south Florida got in on the trade, advertising live alligators, mon-

keys, lions—any wild beast that tourists couldn’t see at home. Travel-

ers pulled over and had their picture taken with the animals as they

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filled up the family wagon.

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As time went on, Florida became a residence where exotic was no

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longer exotic.

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Cookie-cutter subdivisions began to spring up around backyard

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zoos, and public officials started getting complaints about the smelly

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and dangerous animals next door. Five-foot green iguanas began peek-

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ing through hedges in Miami. Seven-foot African Nile monitors started

proof

Anthony Green of Tampa

wrapped in his new pet, Miss

Hiss, a 14-foot-long Burmese

python. Photo by author.

feasting on housecats in Naples. Many residents began to think living

in a menagerie wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

As a result, Florida now has the most comprehensive regulation of

captive exotic wildlife of any state in the union. Perhaps the most no-

table restriction came in 1980, when the FFWCC said people could no

longer keep as pets twenty-four of the most dangerous animals—lions,

tigers, leopards, elephants, rhinos, baboons, orangutans, and generally

mammals that you rarely see outside of zoos in most states. Preexist-

ing pet owners could still keep their animals. The restrictions may have

slowed backyard zoos, but it hasn’t stopped the most fanatical from

living with exotic animals. They just have to jump through more regula-

tory hoops and spend more money to do it.

Basically, the requirements are: You must have 5 acres, proper fenc-

ing, two experienced animal caretakers (one a licensee) who will vouch

that you have one thousand hours of experience handling the animals,

a disaster plan in the event of a hurricane, and a ten-thousand-dollar

surety bond, which typically costs less than two hundred dollars. Li-

censes are either to sell, exhibit, or both. To be considered an exhibitor,

you either have to open to the public or occasionally exhibit them on

the road, say, at schools, birthday parties, or restaurant openings. Yes, I

said restaurant openings: a chimp once mixed cocktails at the premiere

proof

of his owner’s trendy Miami restaurant.

In 2011, the FFWCC issued 865 commercial licenses to people and

businesses to keep one of the twenty-four species of dangerous zoo an-

imals. Licensees range from Disney’s Wild Kingdom to a retired circus

performer who lives with his two longtime partners, African lions. Of

the 865 licensees, only fourteen are accredited by Association of Zoos

& Aquariums (AZA), the gold standard of captive animal husbandry.

The Everglades Outpost Wildlife Rescue falls somewhere in the mid-

dle. While not accredited by the AZA, the nonprofit works closely with

the FFWCC. The Outpost often takes in unwanted or FFWCC-confis-

cated wild animals.

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The 5-acre piece of jungle sits in the outback of Homestead along the

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main road to Everglades National Park. The land is flat and dotted with

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new and old homes and striped with rows of tomato plants. Farms of

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palms and papayas remind that you’re in tropics. Even in October, the

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air is so muggy you can smell the fruit ripening.

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A wooden parrot and hand-painted sign mark the Outpost’s en-

22

trance across from a preserve of south Florida pinelands. Nearly two

hundred animals, mostly caged reptiles, live amid the trees, palms, and

landscaped foliage.

Bob Freer and his wife, Barbara Tansey, also live onsite. Bob is a

licensed trapper, which in south Florida means he’s the guy you call

to fish an alligator out of your pool or remove a 26-foot-python from

underneath your house. He also wrestles alligators just up the road at

the Everglades Reptile Farm. He got his first one at five when his dad

stopped to get gas at a Tampa station that was giving away the baby

reptiles with every fill-up. He’s been caring for wild animals in one way

or another ever since.

Bob and Barbara opened Everglades Outpost back in 1994 primarily

as a rehab for Florida’s native critters, nursing them back to health and

then returning them to the wild. Not long after opening, the Outpost

started getting requests to take in exotic pets. Like Ron Gard, Bob just

couldn’t say no.

An outgoing, burly man with a graying mustache and jazz chop,

Bob’s uniform is a safari hat and a T-shirt with cut-out sleeves. He’s

gearing up to hunt pythons in the Everglades and graciously passes me

off to a longtime committed volunteer. Like most Florida exotic ani-

mal sanctuaries, the Everglades Outpost relies heavily on volunteers

to help care for its wild residents. Terine is a fixture there. She enthu-

proof

siastically welcomes the chance to show off her exotic friends.

Terine is a petite, wiry Latina with a black mullet that hugs her head

like a helmet—bangs and sideburns in front and longer curls dusting

the collar in back. She’s dressed in hiking boots, cargo shorts, and a T-

shirt with a dreamy image of a mountain lion. A pendant of a gold lion’s

head hangs from her neck, and a tiger and a leopard are tattooed on her

legs, all the markings of a big-cat person, a Fla-zoon felidae.

“These animals aren’t pets,” Terine says as we start down the shaded

trail between the tall fenced pens of various pets—hyenas, owls, par-

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rots, donkeys, miniature horses, and various monkeys. “People tried to

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make them pets, but they are wild animals! People get them when they

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were cute and little, but when they get bigger and start to bite, they

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want to get rid of them.”

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She points to the caged ring-tailed lemur that is foaming at the

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mouth. “His owner had his teeth removed because she said he was bit-

gan

ing too much. That’s what they do! They bite! Especially when they are

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teething,” Terine says. “Look at him. Now he has to gum his food.” She

3

sighs.

2

Terine says one overwhelmed monkey owner called demanding that

the Outpost take her pet, complaining it was biting and being gener-

ally unruly. Before Terine could get the OK from Bob, the owner left the

monkey in the Outpost parking lot, and scrammed without even telling

the refuge it was there. “She had the nerve to call us back a few weeks

later and ask if we had trained it yet.”

A shed snakeskin hangs on a hibiscus bush outside the reptile house.

The sign over the door says, “Snakes of the World.” Inside, the walls

are lined with glass enclosures filled with about every snake known to

man, including some of the deadliest—rattlers, anacondas, mambas,

and king cobras. Refuge herpetologist Albert Killian is uncharacteris-

tically absent. He does the snake shows and is a legend in the herper

world; he’s been bitten by poisonous snakes so many times that the

county venom response unit calls him a “frequent flier.” Terine says

this is only a small portion of his collection; he has more than three

thousand snakes. The screws on the terrariums seem perilously loose.

Our time inside is short.

Each animal at the Outpost has a unique Florida story. Buc, a grizzly

bear, was confiscated from a backyard in Miami Beach. A cougar came

from a cocaine dealer’s crib. A camel was to be housed only temporarily

while the owner built an enclosure. That was more than three years ago.

proof

Deeper inside the sanctuary, Terine points out a couple of wolves

in a large pen dotted with tree stumps and rocks. “I’m one of the only

people who can get in there with them,” Terine says and calls to them.

They don’t respond.

Helping out at the Outpost is more of an addiction than a hobby for

Terine. She quit her job as a photographer for the Florida Marlins, a

professional baseball team in Miami, to volunteer there full-time, she

says. She tried volunteering at the area zoo, but it wouldn’t allow her

to get close to the animals. She drove down to Everglades Outpost.

“The first day I was here from ten to four pulling weeds and cleaning

out cages. It was hot, and by four o’clock I was covered in fleas and crap.

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I was going to tell them it was just too much work. Then they asked if I

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could do them one more favor—Could I help walk the white tiger?”

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She led the juvenile tiger around the compound and got her picture

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taken with it. “Then I said, ‘this isn’t so bad.’”

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The Outpost asked her to work Thursdays through Sundays. She ul-

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timately decided that wasn’t enough. “I realized that I would never be

42

as happy as I was working here. Where else can you go and in three

months be able to get in the cage with wolves?”

For the past five years, she has volunteered seven days a week. “I can

actually go into any one of the cages. I can feed all the animals. They

know me, and I know them.”

Money is tight. Terine scrapes by on a modest inheritance from her

grandfather. She bubbles, “I’d rather be poor and happy than rich and

unhappy.”

Lions and tigers at the back of the refuge see us coming and pace be-

hind towering chain-link fences. Seeing a live tiger up close used to be

as rare and awe-inspiring as watching a volcano erupt, both dangerous

natural beauties. But frankly there are so many of the big cats now in

Florida that the thrill is gone.

A tiger in captivity eats about the equivalent of its weight each

month, which means that by the time the massive feline is grown, it

consumes 6,500 pounds of meat a year. You would think that kind of

grocery list along with widely publicized cases of seemingly docile ti-

gers mauling their longtime owners—Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy,

for instance—would weed out the pussycat neo-menagerists. Not so.

A cub’s cuteness can be very seductive, and there’s an enormous black

market of exotics. Some people actually try to get away with illegally

proof

keeping a wild pet as big and ferocious as a tiger without being de-

tected. Then, of course, there are those who are just downright igno-

rant of the law.

The former owner of Rocky, a 550-pound Siberian-Bengal mix star-

ing at us through the cage, is a prime example of the latter. Rocky was

confiscated from a local stripper who was bold enough to tool around

Miami with him as a six-month-old cub in an open-top convertible.

“Fish and Wildlife had heard about a woman riding around with a tiger

in her car, and they just happened to see her one day,” Terine says. “She

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told them she was going to use him in her act.” Wildlife officers brought

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