This is kind of a horrible story but I want to talk about it anyway. Over the last 24 hours police in Ohio have had to track down and kill nearly 50 exotic animals apparently released by their owner before he killed himself.
In the rural Zanesville area of Ohio there was an exotic animal, I guess you’d call it a park, that had 18 of the endangered Bengal tigers, 12 lions and eight black and grizzly bears along with wolves and many types of monkeys.
They have all been killed in an effort to protect the public from these mature predators. The owner Terry Thompson was found dead from an apparently self inflicted wound. The reason that so many of these animals were able to be in a habitat so foreign to them is that Ohio has some of the weakest laws about exotic pets in the nation.
While we should always be concerned when someone takes their life, I am going to say that the real tragedy is that so many of the tigers were killed. It was always a tragedy that a private citizen was keeping such animals, but when his actions lead to the destruction of them that is just insult to injury.
There are only between 3,000 and 5,000 of these tigers left in the wild. There so as many a 2,000 more in captivity but that is a perilously small gene pool for the perpetuation of a species like the Bengal tiger.
Given that they are often used for traditional Chinese medicine they are very susceptible to poaching in the wild. Some of those 2,000 in captivity are raised on ‘tiger farms’ where they are then harvested for their body parts.