An Almost Autoethnography

why-animals-do-the-thing:

neofeliis:

oddarticulations:

oddarticulations:

One of my six ligers I’m working on right now. This big boy will one day be articulated!

Had some people ask….. no I don’t actually have 6 ligers. I technically have 5 ligers (plus a headless one), and a tigon (far right), but I’m trading the tigon for another liger close to the size of the left dude. His skull is roughly 16” x 12”. The others are 13-14” by 9”.

@why-animals-do-the-thing

With all the recent posts and discussions on tracking big cats in the us and knowing where they come from, do you have any insight on these or who would have just lost this many cats? I really only know of one or two places that would have this many ligers, let alone a tigon too.

Ah, I wondered when I would get this question. I have some educated guesses. I’ve spoken to @oddarticulations​ about these specimens, and he knows I’ll be responding based on what he was able to tell me. 

I want to cover two things before I get into my data: sourcing and legality. While it’s illegal to buy or sell pieces of endangered species such as tigers and lions across state lines in the United States, liger and tigon parts are legal because of a weird loophole. The Endangered Species Act does not cover hybrids of listed species, and while the Captive Wildlife Safety Act does cover hybrids, it only prohibits interstate commerce involving live animals. At the moment, it’s completely legal for the OP to have obtained these specimens. I also fully believe the OP when he says that he’s not able to ask for the origin of these specimens from the dealer that sold them - a dealer wouldn’t give out that information and jeopardize their ability to make sales by having someone circumvent them and go directly to the owner of the animals. I don’t like it and I certainly think it looks shady when the animals in question are contentious, but I understand that’s how the politics of the taxidermy world currently work. 

You’re right that there are really not a lot of places these animals could have been sourced from, assuming they all came from the same facility. It’s possible they were not all from the same animal collection, at which point sourcing them based on knowledge of individual big cat holders around the U.S. becomes impossible. The age of these specimens - the time since they died, not their age at death - is also important. If they died prior to 2000 and have been preserved until someone recently decided to part with them, sourcing them with outside knowledge is also impossible because there were so many semi-secretly privately owned cats during the 1980s and 1990s. 

As of 2016, the Feline Conservation Federation census had located a total of 45 ligers in the United States, residing in 15 states. (Tigons were not counted separately because, apparently, all the big cat hybrids are lumped into the same category in USDA inventory lists). The only states with five ligers residing in one facility were Oklahoma and South Carolina: those facilities are G.W. Exotics and Myrtle Beach Safari. I reached out to some of the long-time big cat community members about tigons, and G.W. Exotics is the only non-sanctuary facility known to have historically bred them.

It’s not possible to confirm for sure that the cats all came from G.W. Exotics, but it seems probable. It was recently announced the facility is being closed and the resident animals moved to Texas; while the current owner of G.W. Exotics has been quoted as saying “all our animals will be going with us, we will leave nobody behind,“ as far back as March of 2018, 40 tigers were moved from a “closing zoo” in Oklahoma to the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Colorado. (In 2014, USDA inventories indicated that the facility held 79 tigers). It’s highly unlikely any hybrid cats moved to the Wild Animal Sanctuary with those tigers: they’re striking, beautiful animals with a tragic backstory that are primed for fundraising, and the sanctuary wouldn’t have kept their arrival a secret. G.W. Exotics has a long history of suspicious animals deaths, from the 23 tiger cubs that died in 2010 to recent allegations that multiple adult animals were shot in order to make room for incoming animals in October of 2017. Due to the infrequent social media posts coming out of the facility (it probably doesn’t help that both the past owner is in jail and the current owner has a bench warrant out for his arrest as of November 2018) it’s not possible to confirm how many of the ligers are still alive without visiting. The page that used to be on the G.W. site focusing on their liger breeding no longer exists, although it’s not clear when it was removed. However, news articles and social media posts from the previous owner appear to indicate that multiple animals have died at the facility since June. 

We can’t know for sure where these ligers came from. If they’re older specimens or didn’t come from the same facility, we have no way to know. If the ligers and the tigon died recently and they came from the same facility, it’s most likely they’re from G.W. Exotics. That was my conclusion, but it’s also the conclusion of everyone I reached out to, from the people with historical knowledge of privately owned big cats in the United States to the as people who are currently involved in big cat conservation and breeding work. We’ll likely never know for sure, but it might be possible to learn more in the future by looking at the USDA inventory when the the new Texas facility opens and by watching their social media to see how many of the ligers from the previous facility reappear.