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
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
ad
filled up the family wagon.
ir
As time went on, Florida became a residence where exotic was no
olF
longer exotic.
eg
Cookie-cutter subdivisions began to spring up around backyard
nir
zoos, and public officials started getting complaints about the smelly
F
and dangerous animals next door. Five-foot green iguanas began peek-
02
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.
ad
The 5-acre piece of jungle sits in the outback of Homestead along the
ir
main road to Everglades National Park. The land is flat and dotted with
olF
new and old homes and striped with rows of tomato plants. Farms of
eg
palms and papayas remind that you’re in tropics. Even in October, the
nir
air is so muggy you can smell the fruit ripening.
F
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-
sno
rots, donkeys, miniature horses, and various monkeys. “People tried to
oz-
make them pets, but they are wild animals! People get them when they
alF
were cute and little, but when they get bigger and start to bite, they
F
want to get rid of them.”
o e
She points to the caged ring-tailed lemur that is foaming at the
ire
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
eM
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.
ad
I was going to tell them it was just too much work. Then they asked if I
ir
could do them one more favor—Could I help walk the white tiger?”
olF
She led the juvenile tiger around the compound and got her picture
eg
taken with it. “Then I said, ‘this isn’t so bad.’”
nir
The Outpost asked her to work Thursdays through Sundays. She ul-
F
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
sno
told them she was going to use him in her act.” Wildlife officers brought
oz-