I’d just lost my husband and the courts had seized our assets because we didn’t know where he’d gone, or if he’d be back. That began 2 or 3 years of negotiations between me and the circus to get these cats out of the beast wagons and into our sanctuary. There were plenty of back yard breeders who were using cubs for photo ops and then selling them to the circuses to be used. The keeper said the cats had been there for a couple of years because they wouldn’t perform any more and that USDA was all over them about the conditions, but nobody wanted to spend money on building a retirement center for them because, unlike the elephants, breeding them wasn’t as lucrative. No shade, no toys, no place to lay except on the hot, hard floors of the iron barred cages. I could not believe my eyes when I saw circus wagon after wagon, each with a lone tiger and a water bowl and nothing else. He was angry because his well hidden plot of dirt, where used elephants go to disappear, had been taken over by a long row of circus wagons full of tigers. That led to a road trip to secretly meet with an elephant keeper who said that he just hated tigers and would do anything to get rid of them. It was either late 1997 or maybe 1998 when a friend of mine walked into my office and said, “You have to see this!” Arrived at Big Cat Rescue Bengali was First to Arrive and the Last to Leave
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