Agents intercept tiger cub heading to U.S.
The three men crossed the U.S. southern border into Texas with a black duffel bag, on an apparent mission to deliver their lucrative product to the United States.
But they caught wind of border agents nearby, readying to intercept them near Brownsville, officials said.
It led to a calculation: Now what? And what to do with the unconscious tiger cub weighing down the duffel bag?
The men retreated back into Mexico and the threeor four-month-old male cub became an unexpected ward of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“NOT an average day in the field,” Irma Chapa, a spokeswoman for the Rio Grande Valley sector of CBP, said in a tweet Monday.
Chapa said the tiger cub is “expected to make a full recovery,” and CBS affiliate KHOU reported that he was taken to Brownsville’s Gladys Porter Zoo. Luckily for the tiger, the zoo specializes in handling endangered species.
The cub was an apparent node in the billiondollar trade of animal smuggling, and is in unfortunate recent company: A tiger cub bought by an American teenager was intercepted at a checkpoint in California last summer.
In 2010, border agents recovered a caged and abandoned tiger in Laredo, another Texas border town.
About 350 million plants and animals are sold around the world annually, generating between $7 billion and $23 billion, Washingtonbased conservation group Defenders of Wildlife said in a 2015 report.
Latin America, one of the most biodiverse regions in the world, has emerged as a fulcrum in the endangered and exotic species trade feeding the booming U.S. market.