90 lb. Florida Panther, in a dog trap, in a garage

 

(Photo is 5/15/05 Sundari Leopard smacking my hair.)

 

I had just gotten in from a three hour meeting of the Animal Advisory Committee where we had wrestled with the long range goals of Animal Services and how we would be able to stop the flood of animals in the front doors to be euthanized because people didn’t want them any more.  How could we fund education and aggressive spay / neuter programs in a county government fraught with cut backs?  How could we stop the killing of 34,000 healthy dogs and cats each year in an environment of thought that could only do more of what wasn’t working by building more places for people to bring their pets to die?  It was a topic worthy of the energy we had all put into it tonight, but at the end of the night all we had managed to do was suggest that an outside consultant be paid to tell us how to do it and we would leave funding the implementation to another day’s discussion.

 

Being away from my computer for 3 hours means a pile of emails will have collected and standing at my desk I began to sort through them.  I really wanted to go to bed, so not sitting down seemed to me, as if it say, I was not committed to answering all of this mail, but would see if there was anything that just couldn’t wait until morning.  Then the phone rang.

 

The voice on the other end was shaky, female and began, “I got your number from the answering machine, and I’m sorry to call so late, but I have called everyone I can think of and Fish and Game said they would send someone yesterday, but they never did, and the trapper said he will just euthanize the cat, and the cat is scared, and I am afraid he is going to die, and if I let him loose someone is going to shoot him.  It’s a big cat.  I think it might be a Florida Panther.  It weighs 90 pounds, is three feet long, has VERY big teeth and his paws are as big as my hands.  I caught him in my garage.  He has been tearing up cats in the neighborhood and some are missing.  I think he ate them.  I caught him in the trap with some cat food.  He just fills up the entire trap…”

 

I don’t know how long she went through her description before I spoke.  There was no hurry to speak as she was just flowing with information.  I jotted down the details as I silently pondered her authenticity.  I have been outspoken against people breeding and selling exotic cats and have committed much of my time to trying to stop the trade.  I had become the target of a segment of our society that is comprised largely of drug dealers, criminals and those just too ignorant or uncaring to see that their participation in the industry causes such suffering for the animals.  In their chat rooms they had suggested more than once that the only way to stop me was a bullet.  Was this call in the middle of the night a set up for just such an opportunity?

 

Was this woman’s voice shaking because she was lying and involved in something that could send her to prison?  The notion of a 90 lb. Florida Panther, in a dog trap, in a garage, in a waterfront community like Apollo Beach, was pretty far fetched.  Is that why Fish and Game had not responded, or did she just say she called them first so that I wouldn’t?  I queried her more, asking the same questions in different ways.  If she was lying she would get tripped in her own tale and if she wasn’t she would surely think that I was an idiot who just couldn’t get the picture.

 

After a while I decided that no one could have made up a story like hers and told her I would be sending our Operations Manager Scott and our own licensed trapper to see if she changed her mind about wanting someone to come right away.  Her only concern was if our trapper was of the same conviction as the one she had called earlier and I assured her that we would not kill the cat.  She gave her contact info and it all matched up with the public records.  She was in a high rent district that was not consistent with wher