The Pet Offensive

The DNR also notes that it's unlawful to sell as pets: skunks, raccoons, Arctic foxes, fennec foxes, ring-tailed cats, serval cats, coatis, palm civets, spotted genets, or any other "carnivores which normally are not domesticated." When I informed DNR biologist Steve Bennett that I had seen all these species offered for sale to anyone wishing to bid, he said, "I'm going to pass along this information. It looks like we need to get on these people."

The conditions I encountered at the auction were five star compared with those provided by dealers. When police raided James Bates's Purrfect Parakeet in Poplarville, Mississippi, they found dead and dying snakes crammed like spaghetti into sealed boxes and stewing in their own urine. Many, including the living, were rotting. Most of the rescued animals were infected with salmonella and E. coli. There were heaps of dead savanna monitors and iguanas, some seething with maggots. Bird carcasses that hadn't dried into hard shells were black with ants. There was little food, and water bowls were stained with feces. Some officers fled the building because of the stench. Bates paid a $3,000 fine and $111 in court costs, then was given back the confiscated survivors.

When reptiles get sick, they can take years to die, so there's no incentive for dealers to care for them. About 80 percent of pet reptiles are weakened or diseased when purchased and dead within a year, a fact that keeps the trade in these disposable pets so brisk. "We're seeing countries not signatory to CITES exporting huge quantities of CITES-listed reptiles, and we're seeing signatory countries circumventing CITES," says Joe Ventura, a wildlife inspector at Los Angeles Airport. "They're getting permits for captive-bred reptiles but are shipping wild-caught ones."

Humane and conservation issues are intertwined. Consider pancake tortoises, threatened mainly by the pet trade. The preferred method of capture in their native Africa is to bust up the rock work in which they hide, thereby cracking their carapaces and destroying habitat. When reptiles of any species are kept in filthy, inhumane conditions, they get diseases and are released, because who's going to pay a vet $75 when you can buy a brand-new pet for $15? Two federally threatened species—desert tortoises in the West and gopher tortoises in the Southeast—are being decimated by a respiratory infection to which they have no natural immunity and which they've apparently contracted from released pets. The same disease has damaged already depleted populations of western pond turtles; now it's showing up in box turtles.

Peter Daszak, executive director of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine at Wildlife Trust, calls the alien diseases that come with alien wildlife "pathogen pollution." "I don't know a single example of a chemical causing the extinction of a species," he says. "But we now know there are species that have been driven to extinction by pathogen pollution." He and his colleagues have discovered that the fungal disease chytridiomycosis is wiping out frogs on a global scale. Daszak blames the human reshuffling of the world's frogs for food and pets.

Currently there are about 15,000 large cats—tigers, lions, leopards, and cougars—in basements, backyards, and roadside zoos in the 31 states that permit private ownership. These pets are forever mauling and killing their owners or the neighbors. One Oregon woman had her three lions shot after a mangled corpse, believed to be her husband, turned up in their cage. Particularly popular are white, blue-eyed tiger mutations, the result of inbreeding that leaves animals with hip dysplasia, cataracts, and other physical afflictions. Big cats and other wildlife from the nation's zoos, including those accredited by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, are laundered or otherwise find their way, via wildlife dealers, into the pet trade.

When big cats get expensive to feed and difficult to handle—as they always do—their owners drop them off at roadside zoos, canned hunting preserves, or nonprofit sanctuaries such as Tiger Rescue of Riverside, California. Tiger Rescue even announced plans for a portable classroom "to help better our society." But when police raided the facility on April 22, 2003, they found 88 dead tigers. Surviving cats, including leopards, were in poor shape. In addition to taking in unwanted cats from the burgeoning pet supply, the facility was breeding them. Owners John Weinhart and Marla Smith have been charged with 16 felony counts of animal cruelty.

Unlike reptiles, most big cats entering the U.S. pet trade are bred in captivity, but this raises the price on the heads of wild cats by stimulating the black market in body parts. Special agent Tim Santel of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service didn't put much stock in the tip he got in August of 1997 that there was a plot afoot to buy tigers and leopards and, in violation of the Endangered Species Act and the Lacey Act, kill them and sell their hides, heads, meat, and entrails. It seemed too fantastic. But then another agent got the same tip from another source, and Santel and his colleagues started snooping. They got word that tigers would be coming from Arkansas to Missouri, where they'd be knocked off by people arriving from Chicago. When they learned that four tigers had been killed, Santel sought and received approval for a class-one covert operation. Agent Dan Burleson, who looks like Grizzly Adams, played the role of driver for a cooperating animal dealer. Agents Leo Suazo and Jim Gale played high-roller trophy hunters. Agent Dede Manera played an interior decorator. "There's lots of talking in the trade," Santel told me. "So we knew whenever something was going down. That allowed us to do surveillances or infiltrate one of our agents. When the killers in Chicago wanted cats from Florida, Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Kansas, we volunteered Danny to haul them. He'd be present to witness money changing hands and the falsifying of documents to make it appear that the illegal sales were legal donations. We had undercover cameras inside the trailers or we videotaped from outside. We watched the guys shoot the cats."

Every body part was hawked. Meat was sold to Czimer's Game and Seafoods Inc., of Lockport, Illinois. Gallbladders and other organs went to the Asian medicine market. Hides and heads went to wealthy hunters for their trophy rooms. At least one member of the Safari Club International paid for the privilege of shooting a tiger in a horse trailer. Suddenly tigers purchased for $1,500 alive were fetching $10,000 as carcasses. According to court documents: On March 25, 1998, Will County corrections officer William Kapp of Tinley Park, Illinois, and Kevin Ramsey of Mason, Wisconsin, shot eight of nine tigers inside a Chicago warehouse, sparing the ninth because it was just a cub. On April 1 Kapp changed his mind and shot the cub, too.

At this point too many cats were dying, and the agents scrambled to devise ways of slowing the slaughter. "Hey, let's not kill these right away," they suggested. "Let's keep them alive and breed them, sell the babies and then kill the parents." They even offered to feed and take care of them. The killers loved the idea.