CONSERVATION ...OR CRUELTY?
Reece Oliver’s neighbours were horrified when he put a wild menagerie – including two lions and a puma – in his garden. He says he’s protecting them. But as ownership of exotic pets booms, no wonder experts are asking...
NOT much changes in Strelley, the picture-postcard village outside Nottingham that got its first mention in the Domesday Book in 1086. So you might imagine planning rows among the 700 residents would be about kitchen extensions ruining views of the countryside, or quibbles about boundary fences.
However, recently, such disputes have been of an altogether more exotic kind. They’ve centred round a 400 metres squared enclosure behind Reece Oliver’s stables, which was to be used for the 28-year-old’s show-jumping horses. Neighbours became rather rattled when they discovered it now housed a puma, called Rogue, and is soon to be home to two lion cubs, Rocky and Rora.
Some 14 neighbours objected that the enclosure was too close to the adjoining bridleway, and having so many predators less than 45 metres from the nearest house would be ‘unsafe’. Even so, last month Reece won the battle to keep his enclosure, with the 3.85 metre-high perimeter fence — even if it does interrupt the bucolic view.
However, a visit at feeding time, which involves prodding chicken thighs through the wire mesh of the enclosure, may hint at why some locals insist Reece has bitten off more than he can chew.
For now, the two lion cubs remain in a separate concrete pen at the end of Reece’s driveway, in easy view of the spectacular barn conversion he shares with his mother Karen, who owns a string of children’s nurseries, his dad Gary, a heating engineer, girlfriend Annie, his grandparents — and two squirrel monkeys, called Ronnie and Reggie.
However, while Reece is still happy to play with his two eight-month-old lions, today he declines to get too close to fully-grown puma Rogue for our pictures, saying he can get a ‘little bit rough’, showing me several long scratches on the inside of his arm. This sounds like an understatement considering the three-year-old puma, which Reece says he ‘rescued from the illegal pet trade’, has the teeth and muscle power to kill an animal four times his size.
This, however, is nothing to how big his male and female lion cubs will get. Within two years, Rocky and Rora will be twice the puma’s size, with male Rocky weighing up to 30st.
Hardly surprising then, that signs on the double-meshed enclosures, saying ‘Dangerous Animal Inside’, with an exclamation mark for added emphasis, have done little to soothe local nerves.
When Reece’s big cat collection hit the news last month, the nation was entranced by pictures of the show-jumper cuddling the cute cubs rescued, he says, from a Czech Republic circus.
At times, though, details around that rescue have been unclear. Having first claimed the cubs’ mother had died on his Just Giving fundraising webpage, where he asked for donations to help feed the cats, Reece now says they are not siblings and can be mated.
Animal charities have also questioned his insistence that he was rescuing the lions to stop them being put down. Wild animal welfare charity Born Free Foundation says this would never have happened if he’d surrendered the cubs to its care, so they could be sent to a sanctuary in South Africa.
Certainly, Reece’s story highlights a far more concerning issue: how worryingly easy it is to bring in — and keep — dangerous wild animals in this country.
As it becomes easier for private owners to buy and sell animals online, experts suggest it’s only a matter of time before something goes badly wrong.
Latest research shows thousands of mostly enthusiastic amateurs are now keeping exotic creatures, ranging from lions and tigers to alligators, everywhere from back gardens to tiny flats. The Born Free Foundation found nearly 5,000 wild animals officially classed as ‘dangerous’ living in private homes in the UK. Although this sounds a substantial number, this figure just covers those where law-abiding owners have applied for a local authority licence (which involves a vet visit and payment of a fee that can be as little as £58).
ANIMAL experts say present legislation, first drawn up in the Seventies, is outdated, and the number of privately kept wild creatures in Britain is likely to be even higher.
After all, today, you can procure almost any creature online. A quick search finds dozens of Facebook groups offering to sell lions, tigers, cheetahs and panthers, as well as primates and dangerous reptiles. A trawl of Google turns up marmoset monkeys for sale in Liverpool and Glasgow, as well boa constrictors and pythons, some over 5ft long, for just a few hundred pounds.
On Facebook, one big cat seller, based in Turkey, was recently spotted advertising tiger cubs for £2,300 each, lion cubs for £2,000 and leopard cubs for £1,260, claiming ‘they are well-trained and well-tamed too. They can stay indoors’.
Another seller said he could deliver a leopard cub from Germany to a buyer’s UK home for £1,300 with an extra £160 for shipping costs.
But when dealing with such creatures becomes too difficult or expensive, they often escape or are abandoned — which might explain why the RSCPA received 15,790 calls last year about exotic pets, which equates to more than one an hour.
While not all are classed as officially dangerous, large snakes are also turning up in unlikely places. Last year alone the RSPCA says it rescued
138 pythons and 113 boas. Some more hair-raising incidents include that of the woman in Kensington, West London, who last July — a popular time for snake escapes, due to the warm weather which makes them lively — woke to find a 3ft royal python beside her in bed. After hiding, it was seized by an RSPCA officer the next day as it tried to make its way out.
A month later, another boa was seen crushing a pigeon in London’s Leytonstone High Road.
Big cats and snakes are only the tip of the iceberg, however. macaque monkeys, lemurs and Asian leopard cats are just some of the other animals found by the RSPCA in cramped outhouses and conservatories.
In one small flat in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, last year, staff were even called to rescue a 4ft caiman alligator living in a paddling pool made of wooden board and tarpaulin. And just last week, RPSCA officers seized an African serval cat living in a flat with a family with young children in Putney, South-West London. Such animals can be bought for about £3,000 online.
Reece Oliver, though, is insistent he didn’t pay a penny for his lions, beyond the costs of driving in January to collect them from the Czech Republic in a quarantine van used to transport his horses.
As he has worked with big cats before in Germany (declining to say where at the owner’s request) and has a European Zoo Keeper’s Licence, he says he was alerted to their plight by ‘a colleague’ from the network of UK private keepers he keeps in contact with via Facebook.
All robustly insist their actions benefit animals and that their exotic pets are no threat to anyone.
‘I know one guy who has two bears, cheetahs, clouded leopards and everything,’ Reece says. ‘He has just built a bear enclosure that cost him £150,000. The top private keepers keep the animals better than zoos, where it’s quantity over quality.
‘In private collections, the animals can get more attention, more security, more enrichment, more time,
better facilities. For me, this is about conservation. There’s nowhere for them to go that’s safer. I love these animals like they were my own children. I would have made their enclosure bigger if I could, but I always have the authorities to answer to.’
However, Head of Animal Welfare and Captivity at the Born Free Foundation, Dr Chris Draper, is concerned: ‘Every year, we are getting individuals like Mr Oliver appearing on the radar as confirmed wild animal keepers who want to have them as pets.
‘But an enclosure of 400 square metres is not big enough for one lion, let alone two plus a puma. If Mr Oliver also says he is going to put these cats in together, that’s totally the wrong thing to do. They should be in a dedicated sanctuary. Just throwing in the word conservation is not enough to justify any of this.’
Dr Draper says the wider problem is lack of regulation.
‘The licensing process for owning wild animals involves inspection by a vet to check how animals are going to be kept and how secure they are. It’s up to the opinion of that vet, but they don’t have to be zoo vets, which means they may know little about large animals.’
The one person who is in danger is Reece himself, adds Dr Draper. ‘Lions rapidly get bigger and present more of a risk.
‘Hand-rearing them doesn’t guarantee your safety. If anything, I’d be more worried someone assuming, because they’ve handreared the animals, they’re not going to be attacked. It’s going to create a false sense of confidence.’
Indeed, even dedicated professionals can fall foul of big cats in captivity.
EARLIER this month, an inquest heard how zookeeper Rosa King, 33, was mauled to death by a tiger as she cleaned its enclosure at Hamerton Zoo Park in Cambridgeshire. A gate designed to separate the tiger from staff had been left open, the inquest was told.
Ben Garrod, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of East Anglia, says apart from the risk to humans, there is the suffering
of the animals themselves. He points out that 90per cent of wild animals bought as pets in private homes don’t survive two years.
Primates are also a concern, adds Professor Garrod, author of a new book about chimpanzee conversation, The Chimpanzee And Me, because many species, such as the pair of squirrel monkeys that Reece also owns, do not need licences. As a result, Professor Garrod says it’s now estimated there are up to 5,000 primates in private ownership.
As for Reece’s collection of big cats, Professor Garrod adds: ‘This makes my blood run cold. This isn’t going to end well. He won’t be able to look after them and they will turn on him. Two lions together are also going to kill a puma. You are keeping two very different species together. You wouldn’t be allowed to do that in a zoo and yet it’s being done in a private collection. He’s basically got three loaded guns, which is terrifying.’
However, Reece remains cheerfully confident he is not at risk. ‘Lions are as dangerous as you make them. It’s different in zoos.
‘There, lions are never handled, so you have a 99 per cent chance of them attacking if a door gets left open. If a door was left open accidentally and my lions came out, you’d have a 99 per cent chance of
not getting attacked. I doubt my lions would even leave their enclosure. They’d be too scared.’
For the sake of Reece, and the villagers of Strelley, let’s hope he’s right.