Things are getting biblical in Ohio.
You’ve probably seen the headline: “Dangerous exotic animals deliberately freed in Ohio.”
The proprietor of an exotic-animal farm in Ohio apparently freed the animals before taking his own life. You don’t want to laugh at a story involving suicide and enormous dangerous irrational creatures, but what else can you do in the face of (non-hacked) highway signs like this?
And quotes like this?
“We just had a huge tiger, an adult tiger that must’ve weighed 300 pounds that was very aggressive,” [County Sheriff] Lutz said. “We got a tranquilizer in it, and this thing just went crazy.”
(They’re now shooting to kill.)
And video like this, featuring TV personality Jack Hanna (wait till the end)?
“This is like…Noah’s Ark filled with tigers and lions and all leopards and a few monkeys or whatever and it crashes here and all of a sudden they’re out there.”
Well, if you’re Jonathan Chait, you barely blink: “The dull truth is that the presence of diseased monkeys running loose in the streets does not change things much in Ohio.”
Snark away at Matt and Jack, all you urban sophisticates, but it HAS been raining, most of last night and all day today, and when I was driving home the lights on Maple Ave. darkened suddenly – signs, streetlights, everything. Some of it came back on as I drove. God is good.
The closer you get, the thicker the narrative. I am 7 miles away, maybe a little closer as the cheetah runs. My husband drove 6 car lengths down our driveway this morning to get the paper. Our cats and dog went out and returned alive. Most of the local schools had the first exotic animal day in the history of Appalachia, but not ours. Kids disappointed.
The “exotic animal farm” was not so much that as a performance, a taunt, a strut, a threat. “Proprietor” Noah was known around here by many. Rumored to be worshipping false gods, which might explain why he built and kept his ark on land.
Monkeys are now rounded up except maybe for the last remaining rabid one who is reported on the local newspaper’s website to be also “possibly infected with Herpes B.”
This day’s tragedy is nearly over for Ohio, for CNN, for USA Today, for Chait, for all us gawker types, and will linger only for the few unknown, opaque, and closest. Let us pray.
I have to say, it is upsetting to think of those animals getting gunned down, after being released into a strange and hostile environment. I do understand that the sheriff’s deputies really had no other responsible choice.
The keeping of exotic animals as domestic pets is one of the strange little boutique dysfunctions of American life.
I don’t find any humor whatsoever in this story.
There are always choices. Many people, though, I suspect, consider all animals dispensable.
I think the story is pretty sad, actually. Maybe most people don’t realize how awful unregulated animal parks/zoos can be – check out this photo from Wikipedia’s article on zoos – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edith,_PETA.jpg – the legend … “This chimpanzee was passed around five zoos before arriving in a Texas roadside zoo at the age of 37.”
You don’t want to laugh at a story involving suicide and enormous dangerous irrational creatures, but what else can you do in the face of (non-hacked) highway signs like this?
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What else? I can (and do) feel sorry for the deputies who had to shoot and kill 18 Bengal tigers, 17 lions, etc., etc., etc.
See this morning’s NYT for details of this sickening event.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/us/police-kill-dozens-of-animals-freed-from-ohio-preserve.html?_r=1&hpw
Apparently the owner of the farm was a guy who’d been in lots of legal troubles.
His ;last message? revenge?
This sad mess underscores still another problem of the minimal regulation of “rights.”
We had a guy in our village who kept a couple bears in an iron cage on his back porch. There was a legal wrangle, the details of which were so bollixed up by what passes for a local paper here, that the proceedings were difficult to follow. But the upshot was that the bears had been so damaged by their living conditions that they could not be rehabilitated and released, and so went to a zoo.
Not only is this animal cruelty, and not only can wild animals kept as “pets” create danger to human life if they escape (or are “liberated,”) but exotic animals can also wreak havoc on ecosystems. Aren’t once-pet pythons in the Everglades a problem there?
What a dirty shame.
I understand the deceased owner had recently been released from prison, I believe for gun violations. I understand authorities suspect he was an under-the-table firearms dealer. Based on the sheer quantity of animals described in the news stories, he sounds like he was also an exotic animal dealer.
A man is dead, and it’s a miracle no other people are. 18 bengal tigers, 17 lions, and numerous other animals are dead. And “you don’t want to laugh . . . but what else can you do?” Unless you’re Rush Limbaugh, I would have thought pretty much anything else.
A surprising and in the end rather gruesome story.
With Bengal tigers being an endangered species, how does one man come to own so many? And how did he feed all these creatures? On the proceeds of firearms sales?
Still, I couldn’t help but think of The Life of Pi.
Hi, Rita, as I speculated in an earlier comment – he may have also been dealing in exotic animals. To use the drug trade analogy: he wasn’t the user, he was the pusher.