Capturing a hungry tiger requires patience.
Three days after Christmas, on a gray 15-degree morning in Angola, Ind., Joe Taft tries to coax a female Bengal out of her enclosure for the second straight hour. She refuses to budge.
“Come on, dear,” Taft says, brandishing a severed deer leg. “Come on, Savannah.”
To an outsider, the scene may resemble an action sequence crafted in Hollywood: A 65-year-old man wrangles a 250-pound exotic beast in the middle of an abandoned amusement park. His team, a group of four warmly bundled animal handlers, stand by an open travel crate, ready to drop the hinge door and hoist her into a Penske rental truck.
Any minute now.
Today’s objective is routine for Taft, a seasoned tiger rescuer. Before sundown, his team must transport three big cats—Savannah, her brother, Christopher and Mariah, a blind white tiger—to an animal sanctuary 233 miles south.
“Come on, girl,” Taft presses.
Savannah flicks her long sinewy tail. Anxiety overwhelms her normally laid-back demeanor. She stares, twitches, flashes jagged teeth. Her snorts crystallize into clouds in the frigid air.
She’s never seen this man on her territory, which, for the past nine years, has been Fun Spot Amusement Park & Zoo. She watches him pace along her wire enclosure, pressing snowy footprints in the shadow of a nearby roller coaster.
“Here, girl!” calls Dani Kennedy, her caretaker. “He’s going to take you to your new home!” She employs a soft, cajoling tone—baby talk to an animal nearly three times her size.
Savannah hesitates. She’s wary of placing a paw near the travel crate, despite the humans’ continuous efforts to lure her. She’s agitated by the ruckus, the unfamiliar group, the lack of breakfast at 9 a.m.
But the deer meat proves too appealing to completely resist. It’s fresh enough to drizzle crimson in the snow.
On the other side of the wire, Taft’s hand guides her to the crate’s opening. She creeps close enough to prompt whispers.
“She’s almost there. Get ready!”
Then she lunges away in a flash of black and orange.
***
Across the country, Joe Taft finds them with broken paws, rotten teeth and frostbitten ears: a tiger afraid to leave her 5 by 5 cage, a lion crumpled in a backyard shed, a cougar discarded in an Indiana snow storm.
Saving big cats has been his mission for decades.
He cares for 221 lions, tigers, cougars, bobcats, ocelots and servals at The Exotic Feline Rescue Center, located 55 minutes northwest of the IU campus.
Each has been retrieved from somewhere in the United States. Most require medical treatment, some degree of nursing back to life.
The calls never stop.
“I don’t have a problem with private ownership,” Taft tells visitors. “I have a problem with irresponsible ownership.”
In Indiana and 20 other states, owning a big cat is legal with a permit from the Department of Natural Resources.
Requirements for this permit, Taft says, are inadequate and often inhumane. Almost anyone with a 6-foot backyard fence can purchase a tiger. According to the Animal Welfare Act, a potential owner can pass government inspection if the animal can stand up and turn around in its cage.
People who keep the estimated 10,000 to 20,000 privately owned big cats in America are often ill equipped to care for them.
“There’s a lot of charisma in owning a lion or tiger or leopard,” Taft says. “People buy one to look cool, and later realize they can’t handle it.”
Josephine Martell, program director for the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries, started the Captive Wild Animal Protection Campaign in March to inform the public of the severe safety risks associated with exotic animal ownership.
“Dangerous wild animals are simply not appropriate pets,” she says. “The average pet owner cannot provide for the specific nutritional, safety, space and veterinary requirements that these animals need.”
Unfortunately, she says, that doesn’t stop unprepared people from desiring to browse the exotic market.
“Buying a tiger or a bear is cheap and easy,” she says. “You can find one to buy almost as easily as you can a Black Lab puppy. It’s a runaway problem that has turned into a national public health and safety issue.”
The Rescue Center is proof.
For every 40 abandoned or government-confiscated animals he turns away, Taft has room to house one. It’s a problem he strives to fix by continuously building new climbing platforms, concrete pools and feeding boxes across his 108 acres.
Though farmland and woods border the property, neighboring townspeople hear the lions roar. The sound carries for miles.
Tour fees begin at $10 for adults. Private gifts, which sometimes match the yearly income of the 12 staff members, fund property additions, stock the meat refrigerator and pay veterinarian bills.
Guests are greeted with a warning.
“If a tiger turns around and raises its tail, step quickly away,” he tells them. “If you’re too late and get sprayed, don’t worry. The urine washes out and it smells like popcorn.”
It’s an ongoing joke. Taft once sold bumper stickers: “I got sprayed at the Exotic Feline Rescue Center.”
Sometimes, blinded by awe, guests forget every big cat is potentially lethal.
They desire to pet something exotic. They extend their fingers toward the tigers’ pink noses, which often press against fences. They ignore jaws with gleaming incisors.
Taft cautions everyone: If he bites you, my entire operation could shut down.
“So you can’t touch the cats, but I can.”
Four decades of feline care give him unusual privileges. He knows their names, their feeding patterns, their personalities. Sophie, a playful tiger, often greets guests at her fence. King, a domineering lion, growls throughout frequent grumpy spells.
Taft climbs into the leopard enclosure and pulls Navi, a muscular, black female he’s raised from two months old, onto his lap.
It’s not an uncommon sight.
He kisses Seminole, a playful male he’d recovered in Ohio, on the mouth without hesitation.
Visitors gasp and ask, “Have you ever been hurt?”
“I’ve been bitten a few times when I was younger,” he replies.
They struggle to discern sarcasm from truth: Is he making it up?
Many of his employees can’t tell, either.
***
The morning of the Angola rescue unfolded quickly.
On Dec. 28, fifteen minutes after Taft opened his steely blue eyes at a Comfort Suites in a Auburn, Ind., he climbed into a dirt-flecked Trailblazer and hit the gas.
Time to retrieve the Fun Spot tigers.
When the amusement park closed in 2008, Savannah and the other animals in its mini-zoo remained. Caretakers stayed to look after 11 big cats who had nowhere else to go.
Two years later, the park owners approached Taft. He agreed to eventually take them all. But today, there’s room in the truck for only three.
Taft pondered this on the way, when his team stopped for breakfast at Bob Evan’s.
He sat at the table quietly, sipping black coffee in between bites of eggs-over-medium, biscuits and gravy, hash browns and sausage patties. He wondered if they’d remembered to pack the right gear. They’d be back by dinner time if things went smoothly. Maybe he’d pour himself a drink, unwind to whatever classical song swelled from his television music stations.
One of his volunteers, a full-time truck driver, suppressed a yawn.
“Can we stop at a gas station for some sodas?” he asks.
Taft lowered his fork.
“No.”
It was a typical Taft response. Short, not sugar-coated. Honest, if stripped of social niceties. Rescue Center volunteers attest he’s a saint to the big cats, but seldom shows affection to humans.
Another rescuer laughed.
“Remember Texas, when we didn’t stop for seven hours?” she asks. “I’d say fill up that coffee and eat a lot now.”
Taft remembers like it was yesterday.
Nearly 200 exotic animals faced homelessness when San Antonio’s Wild Animal Orphanage closed in September.
His team devoted five days to rescuing 13 tigers from the compound, where cages had been too small and food too scarce.
One by one, they loaded the tigers into a semi-truck. It was an all-day job, with no time for meal breaks.
As they settled into a hotel that night, the tigers slept in the parking lot.
“You’re prepared for pretty much anything after 150 or so big cat rescues,” Taft says.
***
Thanks to volunteers who grocery shop, Taft rarely leaves Rescue Center grounds.
“Every day requires maintenance for a place this size,” he says. “There’s always something to do. We’re giving them a permanent home.”
He rises each day at 4:30 a.m. without the aid of an alarm. He drains two mugs of black coffee for breakfast.
His house, like his property, is covered in cats. Feline statues, fur patterns and plush animals decorate his living room. Four housecats — whose names, Taft said, are too personal to divulge —meow for canned tuna in the kitchen. An ocelot waits for shreds of steak through the sliding glass door to his deck.
He slips on his signature Reeboks, which were white before a layer of cow blood eroded the leather, and checks his e-mail — the easiest thing he’ll do before he sinks into his easy chair at 7:30 p.m.
Taft’s obligations are endless. He’s got hundreds of mouths to feed. Every cat requires between six to 15 pounds of fresh meat daily. He personally butchers the hoofed carcasses in a sticky, refrigerated room.
He’s got fences to maintain. One cougar has escaped since he opened the place in 1991. Taft assumes it made a home in the wild, miles away from civilization. No other cat has dug through its enclosure. He wants to keep it that way.
He’s got guests to accommodate. For $150 a night, two adults can stay in a room attached to his two-story home and watch a tiger pacing in its enclosure 10 feet from the window.
One recent visitor, Lisa Gabes, brought her husband to marvel at the big cats in rural Indiana.
She could smell their dinner, horse flanks, and hear small bursts of chuffing — breathy snorts akin to a smaller cat’s purring.
She’d rented a room to celebrate the couple's four-year anniversary worlds away from her home town of Aurora, Ill.
Taft, sporting a tan, muddy Carhartt jacket, greeted the couple and led them up the gravel driveway.
“If you feel someone watching you tonight, it’s just Tony,” he says. “Don’t be afraid.”
“Oh, I love the cats!” Lisa responds. “I’ve wanted to come here for years!”
She says she couldn’t wait to see a white tiger, her favorite.
Taft paused. He understood most people romanticized his animals. They’d seen lions and tigers performing tricks in circuses or stalking prey on Animal Planet.
They’d seen lions and tigers as majestic, powerful, invincible. Most people couldn’t fathom where he’d found them, or that their neighbor could be housing one in a dark basement or backyard shed.
“Unfortunately, most of the white tigers on site can’t see you,” Taft tells her. “They’re blind from retinal deterioration."
“How is that?” Lisa asks.
Many in the country are inbred to deformity, he says. Private breeders mate a brother and sister again and again until the rare combination of recessive genes manifest in a cub. Rarely are white tigers captured in the wild.
He recovers them after government officials shut down what he calls “puppy mills on steroids.”
When Taft speaks of this, his voice lowers and his gaze casts downward. He thinks it’s important for people to know.
He employs humor to lighten the mood, which significantly darkens when guests don’t expect his honesty or fully comprehend the Rescue Center’s purpose.
“You know that saying, incest is best?” Taft asks. “Well, it’s not true.”
Lisa rose her eyebrows.
“Oh, I haven’t actually heard that.”
Taft smiled.
“Knock if you need me. I’m right next door.”
***
When they arrived, Fun Spot was deserted aside from a small group of tiger-handling employees.
Rides, like Afterburner and Zyklon, collected frost. Boards covered the Glass House.
The good times halted long ago.
“We blamed closing on the economy,” says Kennedy, who’s worked part-time at Fun Sport for nine years. “When manufacturers started closing around here, we lost their employees. We lost company picnics. We can’t keep funding animal care with no ticket sales.”
Ten minutes into the rescue, Taft captured the first tiger.
They had no trouble getting Christopher to step inside the travel crate. Unaware of the hinge door, he readily crawled toward the steak bait Kennedy had placed nearby.
Sudden imprisonment startled him. He thrashed and roared. His bloodied nose was the only evidence of trauma after he’d settled down, resting his head on his paws.
Savannah, his enclosure mate, witnessed it all.
“I wish she’d gone first,” Kennedy says. “She’s more stubborn than her brother.”
But by noon, the urge to eat overpowered her reluctance.
“Right here, girl!” Taft says.
The tiger, finally tired into submission, crawled into the travel crate. Taft lowered its hinge door with a thud.
“Beast secured,” another caretaker says.
In one explosive instant, Savannah forgot her meal and began to thrash, as her brother had, inside the crate.
Taft and his team inserted two-by-fours in the gaps. Despite Savannah’s attempts to crush the wood in her teeth, they hoisted the tiger and began to carry her to the truck Pharaoh-style.
“The wood is uneven,” one volunteer shouts. “All the weight is going to my side!”
“There’s nothing we can do about it now,” Taft yells, and the group—all 10 of them, including Fun Spot employees—lifted the growling, snapping, swiping cargo into the truck.
Savannah twirled circles, cutting her face on the wire. A trail of blood glistened below her eye. She bared her teeth. She pounded the wire with a great padded paw.
Then, silence.
“They fight for a bit, but they know when they’ve been caught,” Taft says.
Three hours after the rescue mission began, Savannah and the two other tigers relaxed aboard the Penske. They exhibited no resistance, now.
“Well, I suppose that’s half the battle,” Taft says, gazing at the felines.
Back at the Rescue Center, he’d already prepared their home away from the public tour route. That way, each could adjust to new territory in solitude. Moving, he understands, is stressful for big cats.
He’d erected an enclosure on his front yard. Inside, a wooden platform provided options to climb, sunbathe and nap. A doghouse-style retreat offered shelter from rainy days. He’d add Christopher’s bright, red ball — a parting gift from Kennedy — for stimulating playtime.
Savannah, Christopher and Mariah grumbled as they rocketed down the interstate. The truck weaved through traffic, shifting the tigers’ weights back and forth.
Taft wondered if other drivers can hear the growling.
***
That evening at the Rescue Center, lions bellowed. Tigers chuffed. Leopards and cougars, the quieter residents, sent occasional growls into the commotion.
“You can always tell one from the other,” Taft says. “Each species makes its own distinct sounds.”
After the Angola rescue, just like after any other day, Taft wrapped up chores and retired to his home. He slipped off his Reeboks. He poured a stiff Bloody Mary as Beethoven floated from his living room.
It was the first time he’d truly relaxed in two days.
He collapsed onto his queen-sized bed and drifted off to the usual feline chorus.
