Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [111]
The sanctuary was founded by Jonathan Kraft, who used to have his own big cat show – like Siegfried and Roy’s in Las Vegas – before he saw the light and decided to work for the animals instead of having them work for him. Grey-haired, tanned and fit in his fifties, he looked more like a movie stuntman than a conservationist, but his stories were fascinating.
‘Big cats are a huge business in the United States, a fifteen-billion-dollar illegal trade,’ he said. ‘There are more animals – fifteen thousand big cats – in private hands in the United States than there are in all habitats in the rest of the world put together. It’s kind of crazy.’
Jonathan told me there were about seven thousand privately owned tigers in the United States, which meant there were more tigers in American back yards than there were in the whole of India. I couldn’t imagine what anyone who kept a tiger at home was thinking.
‘We just rescued a little baby lion that was typical,’ said Jonathan. ‘Surplus in a zoo, he was sold to a wild animal auction and some girl out of Washington bought him for eighteen hundred dollars. She thought she could keep him, but she didn’t have any licence or permit, so she tried to sell him to a guy in Canada. This animal was two and a half weeks old. Crazy. So we had to intervene and we took the animal from her. His name is Anthony and he’s wonderful. He’s ten weeks old now, a little rascal, and so darned cute. People think they stay that way but unfortunately they end up like this guy over here.’
Jonathan pointed at Sultan, an adult male lion with a huge mane of hair. Lying nonchalantly in his enclosure, Sultan was looking the other way, minding his own business, licking one of his paws, but when Jonathan called his name, he turned around, stood up and walked about four steps towards us. Then he saw the camera crew and stopped to have a think about it, until Jonathan encouraged him. With Sultan standing right in front of us, looking magnificent, Jonathan’s partner, Tina, brought some meat and they threw it over the rail. This giant, beautiful animal looked straight at us, then wandered closer and started eating the meat.
‘We rescued him along with a tiger and he is all right now,’ said Jonathan. ‘He’s about ten years old, right in the middle of when male lions are very dangerous. They have a lot of testosterone. I used to go in and brush his mane. I don’t do that any more. He’d be brushing mine, you know?’
‘It just baffles me,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how somebody could think they could keep a thing like that in the back yard.’
‘Plenty of them do. I know people, private individuals, who’ve got thirty or forty cats in their back yards. Of course, most of them can’t provide the right habitats for them, so you’ve got a cage situation. Next thing, the neighbour’s kid comes over and does a little touchy–feely and the kid loses their arm or their fingers. And then it’s the animal’s fault. It happens all the time.’
Jonathan spent years interacting very closely with wild cats, but he stopped doing that because he thought it sent out the wrong message to anyone who might be watching. All food is now passed to the animals on the end of a long stick or chucked over the fence.
Jonathan pointed at a beautiful female jaguar. ‘Her name is Hope. She’s only a little jaguar, but jaguars pound for pound have more crushing power than any other cat. Compared to a leopard, she has a very short, fat body with stocky legs. Considered the wrestler of the cat family, the jaguar is very tenacious. They’re the only cat that doesn’t kill by a throat bite. They take their prey, bite it in the back of the head and crush its skull.’
Skull crushers. That sounded horrific. Yet people kept them as pets. ‘What kind of thing would tick her off?’ I asked.
‘Food, for one. And other animals. Jaguars are solitary, so she gets annoyed with other animals. I have