‘I’ll just sell a bunch of tigers’
Captive tigers have proliferated in the United States; experts estimate there are now more in the country than in the wild
Joseph Passage, rangy and tattooed with a blond mullet, called himself the “Tiger King” and “one of the world’s experts in tigers.” He was better known as “Joe Exotic.” Over two decades, the zookeeper had built a menagerie on a 16-acre spread off the interstate in Oklahoma. It housed baboons, wolves, a camel trained to “kiss” visitors and many, many tigers — as many as 200, he claimed.
Gregarious and charming, Passage had an irresistible attraction for travelers coming up the highway: tiger cubs, playthings that padded on oversize paws among marveling visitors who paid to stroke their dense fur.
To meet the demand, Passage became one of the nation’s top suppliers of tiger cubs to individuals and private zoos like his own. Some critics accused him of cruel exploitation, viewing themselves as tiger saviors.
One made him mad enough to consider murder, prosecutors would later say.
On a chilly day in December 2017, Passage met with two other men in his cluttered, wood-walled office. The trio’s relaxed chatter bounced between jokes, recent balmy weather — and homicide: One of the men was willing to kill Passage’s nemesis. The cost would be $10,000. Passage was deep in debt, but he said he could manage it. “I’ll just sell a bunch of tigers,” he said, according to an undercover recording by an FBI informant. “Sell a bunch of tigers.”
Passage’s story provides insight into how captive tigers have proliferated throughout America, to the point that there now may be more in the U.S. than in the wild. The use of an iconic symbol of wildness as a sideshow bauble has helped fuel this growth. The big cats have been subject to gradually tightened regulation, but they are still bred and traded with only patchy oversight.
In the Asian forests and savannas that are their natural habitat, wild tiger populations have plunged, leaving fewer than 4,000 of the majestic creatures slinking toward extinction. In the United States, all tigers are labeled as endangered species. But because most of the animals are crossbred “generic” variants of wild tigers and considered not relevant to conservation, the government has been slow to get involved.
A case against Passage, 56, was its first major attempt to crack down. Last year, he was indicted by federal prosecutors on two murder-for-hire charges and 19 wildlife violations, encompassing several illegal tiger cub sales and the killings of five adult tigers. He was convicted on all of the charges except for two of the wildlife counts in April.
The trial was a highly unusual federal prosecution of endangered species violations involving captive animals, and it exposed basic gaps in oversight. It also forced into a courtroom one of most contentious battles in U.S. animal circles: the fight over how many tigers live in the U.S.,
who should have them and how they should be treated.
At the heart of the tiger battle is the cub-petting that Joe Exotic’s business relied upon. An analysis by New York University researchers identified 77 facilities offering public contact with baby animals in late 2015 and early 2016, mostly big cat cubs. These allow visitors — whose ranks have included Ivanka Trump’s children — to pet or bottle-feed the animals.
Although it means removing cubs from their mothers shortly after birth and has sometimes resulted in injuries to customers and cats, the practice is legal. But the Agriculture Department says only cubs between the ages of 4 weeks (no longer “neonatal”) and 12 weeks (when they become “too big, too fast, and too strong”) should be used. That creates an incentive, critics say, for breeders such as Passage to pump out cubs — and a constant supply of 100-dayold tigers that have outgrown their value.
“This is the big mystery,” said Carney Anne Nasser, a Michigan State University law professor who has written about holes in tiger monitoring. “Where do they go?”
Between 2013 and 2018, Oklahoma veterinary records show, the zoo Passage founded, then one of the nation’s biggest tiger suppliers, shipped out of state more than 100 tigers as young as 1 week old. Cubs could go for as much as $5,000. Dozens were sent to private zookeepers and animal owners in Florida, Indiana, Colorado and beyond. The reach of Joe Exotic was nationwide.
In 2012, according to federal records, he sold eight juvenile tigers to the owner of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for an unknown sum. In 2015, he obtained an export permit to ship a lion-tiger hybrid to the United Arab Emirates, a Fish and Wildlife agent testified in March. (Passage told the Washington Post that he sold two hybrids to Dubai royalty for $30,000.)
In April, one tiger born at Joe’s zoo, 400-pound Kryxis, lay belly-down on an operating table in a cement-floored Indiana garage outfitted as a veterinary clinic. The cat was having surgery for a congenital eye defect.
His journey to the facility, the Exotic Feline Rescue Center, started after a private owner near Houston gave him up to a rescue network founded by a former Wall Street executive who now dedicates his life to tigers. So far, he has relocated more than 250 from private owners and collapsed zoos to sanctuaries.
Many of those tigers began their lives as coddled tourist draws — adorable miniatures of an exalted wild animal. They ended up as stunning, massive predators destined for a life behind fences, neither fully wild nor fully domesticated.
“The commercial life of a tiger cub is 100 days,” said Bill Nimmo, the network’s founder. “The problem is uncontrolled, no-limit breeding.”
As Passage built up his business off a stretch of Interstate 35 between Oklahoma City and Dallas, he operated with few legal restraints.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, the federal agency that regulates the wildlife trade, added tigers to the endangered species list in 1970. In 2003, shortly after a tiger was discovered in the Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment of a taxi driver, Congress passed a federal law that prohibited interstate sales and the transport of big cats as pets.
But Fish and Wildlife did not police the domestic exchange of most captive-bred tigers until 2016, because they were considered mongrels with no conservation value. Today, it is illegal to sell any tiger across state lines without a permit from the agency.
The USDA, which enforces federal animal welfare laws, requires sites open to the public, such as Passage’s, to be licensed and periodically inspected. Any other rules are left up to states.
And for a long time, many states did not concern themselves with tigers or other exotic animals. Prominent zoos offloaded “surplus” animals to dealers, who might hawk them at auctions. Small zoos flourished, as did the population of pet tigers. Former boxer Mike Tyson famously owned tigers for a spell in the 1990s.
Today, dangerous wild animals that are privately held and not traded across state lines remain entirely unregulated by four states and only lightly regulated in most others. Laws are unevenly enforced and replete with exemptions — for federally licensed zoos and sanctuaries, or universities with tiger mascots, or people who already owned tigers.
In recent years, several states have banned or restricted such pets after attacks or escapes; Ohio, once known as an exotic-animal hotbed, did so after a Zanesville man named Terry Thompson let loose his 56 animals, including 18 tigers, before killing himself in 2011.
Pet tigers, including a female found in an abandoned Houston house this spring, still occasionally surface. Animal rights activists hold these up as proof of a crisis of tigers in “backyards and basements,” and they are pushing for a federal ban on nearly all private ownership and public handling of big cats. Their opponents, a loose community of exotic-animal enthusiasts and “animal enterprise” advocates, depict those cases as aberrations.
Most tigers are now believed to reside in a vast array of zoos, menageries, sanctuaries and refuges — terms for which there are no agreed-upon definitions.
The mishmash of laws and spotty monitoring have led to wildly divergent population estimates for captive tigers in the United States. Fish and Wildlife says the total “likely exceeds the numbers found in the wild.” The Humane Society of the United States estimates that there are 5,000 to 7,000 caged tigers in this country. In 2016, the Feline Conservation Federation, which advocates for private ownership, used public records and sources in the exotics community to come up with 2,330 tigers.
A Post analysis of USDA inspection reports, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, found 234 licensed facilities holding as many as 1,384 tigers between December 2015 and January 2018. Such reports capture only the animals in licensed circuses, zoos and other exhibitors.
The reality is that no one knows how many tigers reside in the United States. There’s no central tiger database. There’s no microchipping requirement. As Passage’s trial revealed, tigers can easily exist off the books.
“To be clear, I don’t care” about the true number, said Nimmo, whose organization, Tigers in America, puts the population at 7,000. “Because if we’re talking about how many thousands of tigers are outside the zoo system, why are there even 10?”
The commercial life of a tiger cub is 100 days. The problem is uncontrolled, no-limit breeding.”
Bill Nimmo, founder of a tiger rescue network