The Daily Telegraph - Features
‘A UK Tiger King’: inside the big cat menagerie of misery
As its director is found guilty of causing unnecessary suffering, Guy Kelly investigates the Cat Survival Trust
Driving up Codicote Road from Welwyn Village in Hertfordshire, you could easily have missed the Cat Survival Trust on your left-hand side.
The conservation charity and big cat sanctuary has never been conspicuous: found up a long, unsigned driveway, it is contained within some tumbledown barns and hidden behind a modest farm shop. Local people invariably don’t know it’s there at all.
“It’s funny,” one woman, who runs the nearest café, put it, “you’d think you’d have noticed if there were tigers and leopards living in your village, wouldn’t you?”
Today, though, it’s likely that most people in the area know all about its founder and honorary director, Terrence Moore. An eccentric and high-profile character in British big cat conservation, Moore, 77, promised a refuge when he founded the trust in 1976. Instead, a jury has now found he presided over neglect and mismanagement.
In January 2023, Moore was charged with eight counts relating to the unnecessary suffering of endangered animals, 16 counts relating to the use of endangered animals for commercial gain without a licence, and four offences of failing to meet the animals’ needs.
After a trial lasting almost a month at St Albans Crown Court, he has now been found guilty of four charges of causing unnecessary suffering to an animal. Last week, Moore was also found guilty of seven charges of using an animal species for commercial gain without a licence.
Moore has been told he will now be banned from keeping animals. The judge, recorder David Mayall, said he would also order him to pay fines totalling £10,000.
“You had had considerable achievements in your life’s work but the time has come when that has to stop,” said Mayall, who accepted that Moore’s “primary aim” was to care for the animals, but that “you have fallen short because of your reluctance to obtain veterinary care for those animals”. A sentencing hearing has now been adjourned until May 30.
The Cat Survival Trust (CST) was never a zoo – a fact Moore was always eager to stress. As such, it did not have a zoo licence and was not open to the public. It did, however, sell memberships for as little as £7, and lifetime memberships for £200. In return, members could visit the more than 25 mostly rare and exotic cats kept there – from servals to snow leopards – and receive a tour from Moore or a volunteer.
Moore, a former Lloyd’s broker, set up the charity after feeling sorry for a civet on sale in Harrods, so began “rescuing” wild cats from zoos and private collections. He has had pumas, Amur leopards, jaguars, as well as birds of prey, lemurs and raccoon dogs. Moore would allegedly feed wild red kites that circled over the trust so that visitors could photograph them.
While most of the animals arrived at CST from other owners, some were bred on the 12-acre site, barely a mile from the A1. Reportedly, almost all have now been removed.
Being so close to London, Moore’s work frequently attracted media attention. He has appeared on various television programmes, from Animal Planet’s Snow Leopards of Leafy London to ITV’s Daybreak and The Paul O’Grady Show. On the latter in 2008, he brought a snow leopard for fellow guest Katy Perry to hold. During Snow Leopards of Leafy London he was shown mooching around inside the enclosures with only a broom to defend himself.
“You’ve got to differentiate between the people who look after the animals properly, and the ones who’ve just got them for status,” Moore himself said on Predator Pets, a documentary series made by online US channel Curious? Natural World, just last year. “Having one as a pet? I’m sorry, this isn’t going to work, because very few of these cats are friendly enough to be classed as ‘pets.’”
That Moore has always been passionate about cats is without question. He would often sit in enclosures and read a book while Cato, a snow leopard, prowled around him. What’s been less obvious, however, is how enamoured he was of rules and regulations, basic safety procedures, modern medicine and filing accounts. In a separate investigation, the Charity Commission has launched an inquiry into CST after trustees had failed to submit “outstanding accounting information” for 11 years in a row.
It is technically legal to keep big cats – and indeed most wild animals – privately in the UK. Under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976 & 1984, every creature classed as a dangerous wild animal has to be licensed with the relevant local authority, which requires the applicant to prove the animal has suitable accommodation and care, as well as that it would not endanger public safety. It is, however, illegal to use certain endangered species for commercial gain.
In the UK, small private collections of “dangerous wild animals” are rare, especially compared with the US, but not unheard of: a survey in 2022 found that 2,500 licensed animals are being kept in England, including mountain lions, tigers, alligators and zebras. Buckinghamshire
Visiting members handfeeding and stroking the cats through cages was commonplace
leads the nation with 325. Some collections, such as Heythrop Zoological Gardens in Oxfordshire, which hires out animals for television and film, are open by appointment only as private zoos.
“If this was a zoo they’d be chastised on here,” one commenter posted about CST on ZooChat, an online forum about zoo animals and wildlife conservation, four years ago.
“I am not anti zoo, far from it, but [it] is like the UK Tiger King,” they continued, referring to big cat collector and convicted criminal Joe Maldonado, known as Joe Exotic, who featured in the 2020 Netflix true-crime hit The Tiger King. By all accounts, of which there were of course few, the Cat Survival Trust’s membership business model wasn’t hugely successful, but in recent years its coffers were bolstered by hosting photography courses for Jessops. For £125, anybody could attend and get “up close” to the cats. And they would get very close – as would visiting members. Handfeeding and stroking the cats through cages was commonplace, despite some volunteers and trustees voicing concerns about these practices.
The enclosures were small and described variously as “a tip”, “tiny breeze block pens”, “ramshackle” and “a state” by those who had visited. Areas designed with humans in mind weren’t much better. “The visitors room is very cluttered with a distinct mustiness in the air,” reads one TripAdvisor review. “The toilet facilities are disgusting, sorely in need of even a basic clean.”
At the trial in St Albans, prosecutor Charles Miskin KC described CST as “a shambles. It was messy and dirty. Food preparation, storage and disposal were not hygienic, the housing of some animals was inadequate or insecure, and a large number of unvaccinated domestic cats were wandering around exposing the trust cats to risk of disease, especially as they themselves weren’t vaccinated.”
Moore, he added, “neglected his basic duty of care towards some of these animals and caused the ones particularised unnecessary suffering, either through sheer neglect or through a dogmatic dislike of modern veterinary medicine or for financial reasons.”
An unmistakable figure with a white beard and shaggy hair, who tended to wear bright animal print T-shirts, Moore was an everpresent at the site, where he also lives with his wife, Judith. He turns up frequently in people’s memories of the place as irascible and hectoring, as well as prone to airing conspiracy theories in recent years.
“He’s a bit dotty, but means well,” is how one neighbour put it. “As part of his afternoon talk about the trust he lectured us on religion and climate change,” an online reviewer wrote. “I know that some of the group were uncomfortable with his views.” How quickly his tours veered into rants on global warming, vaccines and geopolitics crops up repeatedly in online feedback. For a flavour of Moore’s views, a recent Facebook post, written two days before the start of his trial, is a good place to begin.
“AI predicts that Israel will be destroyed and that Ukraine will collapse. Why don’t idiotic governments check AI to see if their crazy wars will succeed?” he writes. “AI was asked if CO2 is the cause of climate change. It answered that the current magnetic pole shift is causing the change in weather patterns. AI was asked if the Covid jabs were safe and effective. It answered no, they are dangerous.”
The police first visited CST on July 27 2022 with a vet, and found animals suffering from various health conditions. Last month, the court heard that no veterinary care had been sought, and that Moore had a “dogmatic dislike of modern veterinary medicine.” He allegedly preferred herbal remedies. Officers returned eight months later, on April 13 2023, and removed more than 20 animal carcasses from the freezers. The prosecution claimed there were “no records of the mortalities”.
The few local people who visited CST expressed little shock when asked about the charges. At The Rose and Crown in Welwyn, Brian Higgs from Codicote merely tutted. “I’m not really surprised he’s ended up in court because it was just an absolute state,” the 83-year-old says. He took his grandchildren to the site “a couple of times, just because it was local”. While the children enjoyed seeing the cats, “it was all a bit of a mess, so you were left wondering how above board it all was, you know?”
The barman recalled allegedly seeing “a massive cat with sharp claws” outside its enclosure and “just the other side of the fence” between CST and a playing field. “I was just like, ‘That thing is not meant to be there, surely.’”
In 2013, a former trustee, Jamie Godwin, even warned on the Facebook page “Friends of Cat Survival Trust” that he felt uncomfortable with some of the practices that had become commonplace among volunteers, members and visitors. “Can some of you who feel you have special permission to do so by Terry, stop hand feeding the cats. It’s gone back to mental stages again. I have just resigned as a trustee because I do not want to be financially implicated in the result of someone loosing [sic] fingers BECAUSE WE DO NOT HAVE ANY PUBLIC LIABILITY INSURANCE covering us,” he wrote.
Godwin reported that he’d seen a family “turn up with a mound of [chicken] drumsticks expecting a hand-feed” – a dangerous act even with the benefit of bars between the hand and big cat’s teeth. “Seriously, some people need to have a long hard think about what on earth they are doing with these endangered animals and start behaving responsibly and with respect to them and the work of the keepers.”
Moore seemed to trust the cats completely. “The relationship you can build with a cat is, in many ways, often stronger than you can build with a human,” he once said. “They have nothing to fear from you and you have nothing to fear from them.”
Moore, who did not respond to several requests for interviews, has rarely replied to online criticism. But one volunteer, Jen Tiller, did write a long Facebook post in 2018 on behalf of the trust. In it, she defended the enclosures, the cats’ health, and the charity’s finances, responding to “concerns raised by visitors – some of them genuine, and shared by CST, and others which are based on mistaken assumptions”.
Most boil down to a lack of money: “For many years, the place teetered on the brink of closing because of the lack of funds, the not-for-profit shop paying the core bills but that was about it. Membership fees remain very low, and apart from photodays run by companies, the occasional fundraising event, and donations [...] there are no other sources of income.”
She noted that the charity also “supports environmental work abroad”, such as purchasing land overseas “to protect endangered species of cats”. Yet it appears that funds never materialised for necessary improvements to address visitors’ concerns. How it took more than 12 years for the Charity Commission to launch an inquiry into those accounts is another question.
Moore’s motto for the trust was “Working to Give Wild Cats a Future”, but in failing to provide even the most basic requirements of running a conservation charity, what future Moore and the CST have remains to be seen. Mercifully, the big cats once under his “care” have been rehoused.
In Codicote Road, the CST looks even quieter and less well kept now. Before the trial, Moore was still working in the farm shop. Above, the red kites still circle, looking for a meal ticket. They may be the most exotic visitors for some time.