The Allure Of Exotic Animals In Strange Places

Nova is a four year old clouded leopard with round ears and spotted fur. When it disappeared from the Dallas Zoo in January, officials assured the public that it posed no threat to anything other than squirrels. "Thinking like a cat, he probably went straight into the tree and didn't come down," Harrison Edel, the zoo's executive vice president, told a news conference. Nova was found that day after an agitated squirrel alerted zoo keepers to his presence. Apparently, he escaped from a wound in the yard. The next day, zoo officials found similar bits in the wire netting surrounding the display of langur monkeys, an endangered Southeast Asian leaf beetle. The monkeys failed to escape, but zoo officials fear the worst is yet to come.

This suspicion is justified. According to a story later told to police by a man, Davion Irwin, he waited until dark on the night of January 29, jumped a fence, broke through the fence surrounding the Tamarin Emperor Gallery and escaped with two baby monkeys. One pound creature. He took them with him by tram to an abandoned house where he kept a group of cats and pigeons. Police caught him four days later near the Dallas Aquarium, where he was asking questions about octopuses and sharks. Irwin was charged with six counts of animal cruelty and two counts of theft.

Texas, with its long coastline and international borders, is a breeding ground for the wildlife trade. "It's all about the money. After all, someone somewhere needs the product," Major Brent Sutsky of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Service told me. Satsuki said she had seen many species being sold during the agency's special operations. "All kinds of reptiles - like reticulated pythons, Burmese pythons, crocodiles and turtles," he said. There is a king cobra in the Dallas Fort Worth area. The audience shouldn't just be cobras. That's not a good idea."

However, Irwin's motivations appear to be more psychological than financial. He told police he loves animals and would buy more if they released him. Irwin wasn't the first person she liked and then stole an animal from the zoo. In 2020, Cory McGilway is researching "Food for Lemurs", "Lemurs Eat Chocolate", "Lemur Animal Care" and "Monkey Names" after a ring-tailed lemur named Maki goes missing from the San Francisco Zoo. McGilway spent nearly eighteen months in prison before being found guilty of one crime; According to zoo officials, Mackey has become a "symbol of resilience and courage" and a "fan favorite".

Texas laws governing exotic pet ownership are very liberal. Even though most Texans live in urban areas, the population's sense of self is still tied to ideas of boundaries. Perhaps for this reason, or a general tendency to exaggeration and stupidity, or simply because they can, many Texans choose to coexist with all kinds of alien species. McGilloway is not allowed to keep lemurs as pets in California, but in Texas he can keep monkeys or cobras with a permit. The state is home to several privately owned (and underserved) big cats, and Texas Monthly once ran a column titled "A Brief History of the Texas Tigers 2021" detailing several escapes, captures, arrests, and more. First five months. That year, the animal saved the tiger. Recently many pet kangaroos have escaped.

Perhaps the best-known (and most profitable) non-native species in the state is one that lives on a Texas ranch. The practice started nearly a century ago at King Ranch, a sprawling estate so iconic that Ford calls it the premium version of its SUVs and trucks. In 1930, the San Diego Zoo brought a herd of long-necked antelopes from India and Pakistan to the ranch. They are content with a subtropical climate and no natural predators, increasing their population. Over time, King's Ranch began to attract hunters looking for exotic trophies. In recent decades, when drought and rising temperatures made it impossible to raise livestock in parts of the state, thousands of landowners filled their herds with antelope, sheep, and goats from Africa and Asia. Hunting of native animals such as white-tailed deer is restricted to certain months, but there are no laws against shooting, for example impala or Cape buffalo, so hunting can continue year-round.

The industry contributes $1 billion to the state's economy, according to the Texas Exotic Wildlife Association, and exotic game breeders in Texas are increasingly positioning themselves as both conservationists and capitalists. Wildlife Partners, an exotics breeder and broker, promotes livestock as an investment that "continually outperforms many traditional investment vehicles such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds." Because hunters will pay a premium, in some cases tens of thousands of dollars, for endangered species, farmers are encouraged to keep animals in habitats threatened by hunting and habitat loss. Some species, such as the endangered addax and mountain bongo, are more abundant in Texas than in Africa. The sword-horned oryx was declared extinct in the wild decades ago, but thousands of individuals live in the Texas highlands.

The desire to construct reality and call it nature – the belief that the best way to save something is to make money from it – seems to me to be quite Texas. Of course, resources don't always work properly; The animals jumped over the fence and went wherever they wanted. Consider the woolly horned sheep from North Africa brought to Texas as an exotic game in the 1950's. Some have managed to escape into the wild, where they have interbred so vigorously that they now travel in flocks of several hundred, eating native species. In the west of the state, Texas parks and wildlife officials have "captured" bulls by shooting them from helicopters, having had little success controlling their numbers so far.

Texas exotics are so adapted to so many roles as symbols, resources, trophies, and pets, that it's easy to forget they're animals in the end. One day, on my way back down a road near the New Mexico border, I surprised a hoofed creature with a blunt face and tall horns resembling an elk. He looked so out of place with such a strange gait that for a moment it seemed to me that I had slipped through a wormhole and found myself in the savanna. It was wrong and amazing to be in the same place at the same time, two different Texans, in a strange world. ♦