July 2012  Carole presented this at the Taking Action for Animals conference in Washington, D.C.

 

One person can be the cat-alyst for change. If you are sitting in this audience, YOU might be the kind of person who has the passion to overcome the impossible in order to help save thousands, or millions of animals. Rose Church is one of those people.

 

How many of you have heard about Tony the tiger who has been kept at a Louisiana truck stop for the past decade?

 

How many of you have heard of, or recognize Ian Somerhalder from the Vampire Diaries?

 

Ian Sommerhalder

 

Rose Church is a pro bono attorney for the Ian Somerhalder foundation and she wanted to get Ian involved in freeing Tony the tiger. Ian has 2,300,000 followers on Twitter and she thought that getting him to Tweet about Tony might help raise awareness about Tony the truck stop tiger. She contacted me to ask what Ian could ask his followers to do.

 

Even though we get more complaints about Tony than any other single situation and have been working to free him for the past decade, we had exhausted our ability to do anything. We had hired the tiger a lawyer and had shown up with plenty of supporters to testify, but it had become obvious that the state of Louisiana was not going to do anything. USDA has revoked the license to display the tiger, but that rarely seems to stop exhibitors from exhibiting.

 

The ALDF (Animal Legal Defense Fund) had continued the fight in the only venue left, which was the legal system. Court cases wind their way through the system like a river of molasses so there wasn’t much anyone could do. It seemed like the whole world already knew about Tony, so having Ian Tweet his audience didn’t seem like a terribly productive thing to do. If we had the help of a celebrity we told Rose that he could make a far great impact for thousands of tigers like Tony by educating his fan base about the issue that causes so many tigers and other big cats to end up being bred, exploited and discarded.

 

The underlying cause for almost all of this suffering is cub petting.

 

I explained to Rose that it was big business in the U.S. for breeders to charge the public to pet or pose with big cat cubs. One claims to have made $23,000 in a single weekend at a mall, charging people to have interaction with the cubs and / or have their photos made with the cubs. The breeders and dealers were doing these pay to play sessions with older lions and tigers up until the death of a high school student named Haley Hildebrand.

 

Thanks to pressure from the media and then the public, the USDA issued a FAQ sheet suggesting that cubs under 8 weeks should not be used this way. In a separate appellate court case the judge ruled that cubs over the age of 12 weeks were too dangerous for such interaction. The unintended result was creating a loophole whereby breeders could still charge customers to touch cubs who were between 8-12 weeks old. That resulted in massive breeding in order to have profitable cubs to use. Since their shelf life was only 4 weeks, breeders decided to produce lion and tiger cubs every month so that they would always have “legal” age cubs to use.

 

Rose could hardly believe her ears. First of all, she had never seen these mall exhibits where tiger breeders set up shop and offer cubs as photo props all day over a four day weekend. Second, she couldn’t believe that USDA hadn’t done something to close that 4 week window they had created.

 

It can be anything from fixing a broken toy to curing some social ill; have you ever had one of those moments where you see a situation and think to yourself, “I can fix this.” This was Rose’s moment. She said to herself, “I can do something about this!”

 

Rose figured there at LOTS of animal protection groups out there and if they all worked together they could fix this thing. But, she doubted that anyone would listen to her if she made the suggestion that they do so. She took the information to her professor from Law