No More Snow Leopards at Big Cat Rescue

 

I shut off the Snow Leopard cave air conditioner for the last time tonight.  Cloe the Snow Leopard had just left her exquisite body and was bound for that place where all good cats go when they die.  As I walked to the office, the chorus of lions stopped me in my tracks to listen.  An over-sized butterfly began circling me and then perched on a branch right above my head for a long moment before disappearing high into the boughs of the tree and darkening sky.  I felt it was Cloe;  happy to finally be free and wanted to share the moment with you.  She kept circling before stopping to say, "Good-bye" and leaving.

 

 

 

Note from the future (7/4/2021) I’m not sure the transfer dates in the Snow Leopard Stud Book are accurate, but they could be.  Some of them at least.  I thought that Hercules arrived somewhere around June 17, 1997 but according to the records on file, it says he arrived 6/29/1997.  If so, that means Don gave me Hercules the day before he left for Costa Rica on June 30, 1997.   In Tiger King, Murder, Mayhem & Madness, some people said Don was going to take the cats to Costa Rica with him and leave me behind so the time of this seems to take the wind out of that sail.  There would never be a better time for Don to try and smuggle a snow leopard to Costa Rica than that trip because Hercules would fit in a pet cat carrier and he was already down in West Palm Beach with Marc McCarthy, so Don could have flown the cub out of Miami, or via barge, rather than bring him to me as a belated birthday gift. 

 

At the time that Don gave me Hercules, he said that he’d paid $10,000 each for him and a female from Marc McCarthy, but that the female was going to the Dallas Zoo to be on display while she was a cute cub and she would come to us as soon as she grew up.  I didn’t know about the stud books back then so I didn’t know that Hercules, Cloe and Zoe were all born at John Aynes place called Oakhill in Luther, OK.   I’d heard of John Aynes and knew his lover’s mother had been killed by a leopard at his place.  I think that was around April of 1997.  I think we had gotten a serval or two from him before as well.  What is telling here, is that John apparently sent 4 week old Hercules to Marc McCarthy on June 28, 1997 and Don must have picked him up that day, or the next morning to have brought him to Tampa on June 29, 1997.

 

What is even more interesting to me is that I’d been told the female who would be coming to us went to the Dallas Zoo, but the record show that two three week old female siblings were sent to Fort Worth on May 30, 1997 but when they reached a mere 7 weeks old they were shipped back to John Aynes in OK.  The record is wrong for sure here though, because it says that Cloe came to me  6/29/1997 (same date as Hercules) but she didn’t.  Both Cloe and Zoe came to me on April 20, 1998, but they show here that Cloe was in Ayne’s possession June 29, 1997 and came to me April 20, 1998.  Zoe’s record is all messed up as it claims she came to me with Hercules June 29, 1997 and then went back to Aynes on April 18, 1998 and then to McCarthy on April 20, 1998 and showed her dying there on Aug. 18, 2003.  Zoe died here from a spider bite in 2003.  Hercules died from cancer Jan. 29, 2010.  

 

In April of 1998 when I was contacted by McCarthy, he said that he had the female Don had bought for me, but that her sister would surely die of a broken heart if I broke them up.  I didn’t want her to end up in the trade where she would be bred to death, so I paid the ransom for her so the sisters could stay together.  By this time they were a year old and Hercules had been living in my house all this time.  This is when my father started building the snow leopard triplex with air conditioned dens, so they would be able to stand the heat here.  I don’t recall now if McCarthy told me, or I assumed, the females had been at the Texas zoo this whole time, as Don had originally told me.