Wisconsin’s lax permitting requirements for wild and exotic animals could enable tigers, kangaroos or zebras as unnatural neighbors.
“What’s up, handsome tiger?” Andy Carlson coos as he hops over the emerald-colored metal gate separating the public from a chain-link fence enclosure. “How are you doing?”
As Carlson comes into his view, Kubwa the tiger saunters up to the fence and starts “chuffing”—a friendly big cat greeting that sounds at once like purring and a steam engine.
Carlson, wearing a bright tiger-striped bandana on his head and two small studs in his ears that mirror the big cat’s white ear markings, mimics the noise as Kubwa rubs his massive head against the fence.
“Yeah, well it’s good to see you, too,” Carlson says, kneeling down and getting nose-to-nose with the 650-pound feline through the fence.
For the past 20 years, Carlson has volunteered at Valley of the Kings Sanctuary and Retreat, a refuge for abused, abandoned, retired and injured exotic animals. Jill Carnegie, an avid animal-lover since she was young, founded the sanctuary 43 years ago and learned how to care for the sanctuary’s animals on the job, through her veterinary friends and from reading countless books.
Carnegie, along with her husband, Jim, and a handful of dedicated volunteers like Carlson, keep the place going. Located on 10 acres in Sharon, Wisconsin, a small village perched on the Wisconsin-Illinois border whose “downtown” area is basically a bar and a deer-processing business, Valley of the Kings houses species of all sorts—a bona fide “Noah’s Ark,” Carlson deems it.
Many think of Wisconsin wildlife as being white-tailed deer, raccoons, robins, badgers and walleyes, but lying in pens, cages, homes, garages and basements in both rural and urban areas throughout the state are undomesticated, exotic species like tigers, lions, wolf hybrids, bears, iguanas, primates and more. In Wisconsin, you could live next door to a wallaby—a species native to Australia—and never know it.
Even though their species may have originated in a place thousands of miles away, these animals are here because Wisconsin is one of the few states in the nation where qualified residents do not have to obtain a permit to own a wild animal if the animal is not native to Wisconsin, according to Wisconsin law. However, because there’s no consistency with neighboring states’ laws, it’s the ideal environment for a black market industry to flourish and a breeding ground for animal exploitation.
Consequentially, when an individual doesn’t care for an animal properly or the animal no longer meets their desires, animal specialists and services struggle to manage the aftermath.
Kubwa, for instance, wound up at the refuge after a woman from Big Bend, Wisconsin, a village in Waukesha County, purchased him illegally online as a cub. Like any healthy living being, Kubwa started growing as he aged. According to Carlson, his owner didn’t like that.
When he didn’t look like an innocent cub anymore at six months of age—already weighing a hefty 250 pounds—Kubwa was dropped off at Valley of the Kings, Carlson says. He has never left since, nor will he ever, nor will any of the animals at Valley of the Kings.
Compared with some of his peers at the sanctuary, Kubwa had it easy. Obie, a male tiger now the size of a pony, was seized during a drug raid in Chicago when he was just weeks old.
Lena, a dainty female tiger, was one of a dozen big cats taken from an ex-circus worker hoarding them in 4-foot by 5-foot tarp-covered crates in his Indiana home.
Carlson says when Lena arrived at Valley of the Kings and finally worked up the courage to venture out of her crate, she constantly stared upward because she was fascinated with the sky. She had never before seen the light of day.
Those living close to Valley of the Kings don’t seem to mind the big cats, bears, wolf hybrids and more living in their vicinity. In fact, they seem to be fond of them.
Ryan Fahrnow, who works at Kip & Deb’s Tavern in Sharon, Wisconsin, just a few cornfields away from the sanctuary, says the community doesn’t feel threatened by the presence of the animals.
“I honestly don’t think twice about it,” Fahrnow says.
Unfortunately, the clandestine subculture of owning exotic animals as pets is usually revealed to the general public only when authorities stumble upon neglected animals or when the animal bites, mauls or kills a human. When either of these situations occur, the first action taken is usually to attempt to discard the animal.
For most, if not all, of the animals in these situations, there would be two options if it weren’t for Valley of the Kings and other sanctuaries or a rare zoo with a vacancy: the receiving end of a lethal injection or a one-way trip to a canned hunt range where big game hunters can pay tens of thousands of dollars to bait, hunt and slaughter them within an enclosure.
Current state legislation does not require qualified residents to obtain a license to own an animal—besides native species, that is. This makes almost any wild animal fair game, except for cougars, bears, and wild and feral pigs, deemed “too harmful”; any species that is native to Wisconsin; or any species that is threatened or endangered in the United States or Canada. These regulations do not apply to veterinarians, aquariums, zoos, circuses, the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, or the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
After obtaining a license, if necessary, purchasing the animal is another matter—state law mandates that all wild animals must be obtained legally, which is difficult—but not impossible—to do in Wisconsin.
Run a quick Google search of “lion cubs for sale.” You can have your paws on one for just $1,500. Another website selling tiger cubs for a few grand promises that “you will discover that it can be a lovely pet as well as loyal, friendly and TOTALLY HARMLESS.” A third advertises its tiger cubs with pictures where they’re posing next to human babies.
Mark Hess, who has held various titles at the Humane Animal Welfare Society in Waukesha, Wisconsin, for nearly four decades, is no stranger to the dire consequences that exotic animals face when their owners mishandle them. As the current operations manager at the society, he’s the man called when animals are on the loose.
In the early-morning hours of a Wisconsin winter years ago, an ex-pet shop manager trekked out to his farmhouse in southeastern Wisconsin to feed the snake he took from his store before it went bankrupt and closed. As he was doing so, the venomous snake bit him. He managed to call 911 and was rushed to the hospital. Hess was brought out at the frigid hour of 2 a.m. to deal with the serpent.
“We didn’t know exactly what it was, but we knew it was something weird,” Hess recalls. “The exotics really do pose some challenges, even for us, because they’re not used to being handled. And we have to bone up on them, find out what they are, find out what their diets are, find out how to handle them, and sometimes, [find out] what in the world is it?”
Hess and his team were eventually able to lure the snake outside the farmhouse into a glass aquarium and bring it to the Milwaukee County Zoo. Officials at the zoo struggled to figure out its species at first—it wasn’t native to the United States—but ultimately determined that it was a spitting cobra.
“There’s no reason anybody in this world should have one of those as a pet,” Hess says. “We don’t have one at the Milwaukee County Zoo, and we have quite an array of poisonous snakes…People have to have something unusual to be…the talk of the town or within their circle of friends.”
Somehow, the cobra’s owner managed to survive its normally deadly bite, but the snake itself wasn’t so lucky in the end. No place with the knowledge and resources to care for it was available, so the cobra was euthanized.
In his four decades working with the humane society, Hess has dealt with a cornucopia of exotic animals in southeastern Wisconsin, including an escaped wallaby, a primate living in a dead man’s basement, an ostrich on the loose and a handful of snakes that meandered out of their crates at General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee.
“I’ve seen a lot of different situations and nothing really surprises me anymore, but it’s kind of a tragedy for the animals,” Hess says. “With exotic animals, I’d like to see some stricter ordinances on them, but there aren’t, and sometimes the animal only becomes a victim later on…Oftentimes, communities don’t even think about these situations until one happens, and then they’ll scramble and find out they have nothing on the books.”
Several communities throughout Wisconsin have been able to pass legislation on their own to ban certain types of exotic animals within their borders.
The Dane County Board of Supervisors prohibits elephant acts within the county borders, and the City of Oconomowoc forbids anyone from keeping monkeys or any other nonhuman primates, raccoons, skunks, foxes, wolves, wolf hybrids, poisonous snakes longer than three feet, leopards, panthers tigers, lions, lynxes or “any other warm-blooded animal which can normally be found in the state.”
While limits exist within certain municipalities, the state has yet to put forth comprehensive legislation that protects exotic animals from dire fates when their owners do not take care of them.
Rep. Warren Petryk (R-Eleva), and a half-dozen other state representatives proposed Assembly Bill 703 this past January. The bill sought to prohibit “the possession, propagation, and sale of dangerous exotic animals,” which involved “nonnative big cats, including lions and tigers; nonnative bears, including brown bears and polar bears; apes, including gorillas, chimpanzees, and gibbons; and crocodilians, including alligators, crocodiles and caimans.”
In February, the Leader-Telegram of Eau Claire wrote that “Petryk cited incidents involving exotic animals in Wisconsin, including a 3-year-old baboon that was confiscated from a basement in Dane County in 2011, an alligator discovered in a Beloit apartment in 2009 and a lion cub that bit a child at a Baraboo pet store in 2005.”
The bill was supported by the Humane Society of the United States, the Milwaukee Police Association and the Wisconsin Counties Association along with several others, but was met with opposition from Wildwood Wildlife Park, a zoo in Minocqua, Wisconsin, the Madison Area Herpetological Society, Timbavati Wildlife Park in the Wisconsin Dells and a few other ranches throughout the state.
“It really came down to an individual’s rights and ability to keep the animal that they want, as long as they’re able to keep the animal in good condition,” says Ryan McVeigh, president of the Madison Area Herpetological Society, on why he opposed the bill. “[We don’t want to] take away that ability for someone to keep an animal that they may enjoy more than a dog or a cat, but we still would like to see laws that have consequences for ill treatment of animals.”
Several private animal owners and breeders in Wisconsin were contacted multiple times for this story, but did not respond—likely because of the controversial nature of the issue.
This April, AB 703 went dead after it did not progress through the legislative process during the 2013 to 2014 legislative season, Petryk says.
In other words, there’s currently nothing stopping you, a circus, a hoarder, a drug dealer or virtually anyone from owning an exotic animal on his or her Wisconsin property. Purchasing one is a little more difficult, but the Internet has plenty of breeders and dealers willing to smooth down that bump in the road for interested parties.
The people at Valley of the Kings know that too well.
“Every year thousands of animals get caught up in the breeding cycle of the [black market] industry,” Carlson says, “and when they have outgrown their usefulness for the people that have them, they are treated as a liability, and they’re not wanted anymore.”
The animals at Valley of the Kings will never know life outside of a pen, but weighing their fates against those of many other exotic animals in Wisconsin, they’re living luxurious lives. They have a regular supply of water and food, space to stretch their legs and a view of the sky.
When they die, they’ll be buried in the ground at Valley of the Kings. It is then they will finally return to the wild.
Where do these animals come from?
In Wisconsin, there are very few restrictions on the species of exotic animals that residents can own as pets. Many of these species are not native to the United States—or even North America. See where some of these species originated by clicking on the dots around this map.
[googlemaps https://www.google.com/fusiontables/embedviz?q=select+col2+from+1ObzbGldE2lw7r0ej71R4dz26EoRaiXg-Y9SfWrg5&viz=MAP&h=false&lat=19.768746211844082&lng=32.02928625000004&t=3&z=2&l=col2&y=2&tmplt=2&hml=GEOCODABLE&w=745&h=533]