Some exhibitors will let you pet a
tiger cub for a fee. This happens at the park, reserve,
preserve, zoo, sanctuary (not a true sanctuary),
orphanage or whatever they call the permanent facility
where the animals are kept. Other exhibitors have
mobile exhibits that
travel almost constantly, setting up in malls and fairs.
The cubs are taken from their mothers soon after birth,
a torment to both cub and mother, and then carted around
to strange settings to be groped by strangers hour after
hour. One such exhibitor had 23 cubs die in 2010. These
exhibitors are USDA licensed but their tigers are not
tracked.
Federal regulations currently permit cub
petting for 4 weeks (from 8 to 12 weeks of age). Florida
law allows contact up to 25 pounds. Exhibitors have been
known to extend the petting time by underfeeding or
giving pills to cause diarrhea, which keeps the cub as
small as possible but can lead to permanent health
problems. When used for photo ops, the repeated close
camera flashes can injure their eyes.
Exhibitor with 23 cubs dead on the road.
Once the cubs are too old or too big for
petting, they are sold, given away, returned to the
breeder if they were leased, and spend the
rest of their lives
—
up to 20 years
— in
miserable conditions. One exhibitor who has both a park
and a retail store in a shopping center for cub petting
has admitted privately that he requires 200 cubs per
year to operate his petting business.
Other exhibitors display full grown
tigers, either at their facility or offsite. When
offsite, the cats typically are confined to a small
wheeled wagon where they can do little more than stand
up and turn around, or lie down all day long, often in a
hot parking lot.
Many of these facilities are in remote
locations, but some are in residential neighborhoods.
These operations frequently call themselves sanctuaries
or rescues but are dangerous for humans as well as the
cats and substandard by any measure, especially cage
sizes.
Federal regulations do not have a minimum
cage size. They have language about allowing the animal
to be able to make postural movements. The only known citation
for cages being too small was a woman in Florida
who put more than 68 tigers in small cages in one
trailer. Unlike federal regulations, Florida law at
least defines a minimum cage size: two tigers can be
kept for their entire lives in a 10’ by 20’ concrete and
chain link box with nothing to do but pace until they
are exhausted and then lie down on a concrete floor. And
Florida’s law is the most generous.
A tiger in the wild roams from 9 square
miles (Bengal) up to 400 square miles (Siberian) every
year.
Exhibitor education is doing more harm
than good:
In order to justify their tax exempt status, exhibitors
say educating the public about wildlife conservation is
one of their goals.
There is no evidence that people who hear
exhibitors talk about conservation take any action that
supports preservation of the tiger in the wild. R. L.
Tilson, in a research report on private ownership of
tigers, reported that, “During the 2002 Tiger SSP Master
Plan meeting, there was a consensus among the
participants that handling tigers in public
places…promotes private ownership and a false sense of
security in handling big cats….”
Exhibiting cute cubs gives the impression
that they make good pets. The message the exhibitors end up conveying is
you should not own a tiger unless you are special
like they are. The same people teaching that tigers
should not be pets often sell them or even give them
away once they are too big to use for 'pay-to-play'.