Bed & Bengal

[Times photos: Toni L. Sandys] Shere Khan, an 800-pound male Bengal-Siberian cross tiger, enjoys the pool in his enclosure at Wildlife on Easy Street in Tampa.

By COLETTE BANCROFT, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 15, 2003

Spend the night at a Tampa animal sanctuary that provides a haven for big cats rescued from fur farms, retired from circuses and rejected by people who thought they'd be the perfect pet.

TAMPA -- As I carry my overnight bag into the cabin at dusk, the nearby lake reflects the lights over the Veterans Expressway. To the north, the mall in Citrus Park glows beyond the oaks.

Fifteen feet from my cabin door, a leopard crouches in the tall grass, then makes a 10-foot pounce and eyes me the way my house cats eye a careless mockingbird.

Luckily for me, the big cat is inside a heavy-duty wire fence enclosure. On these 40 acres in the middle of the exploding suburbs of northwest Hillsborough County, 170 wild cats are permanent guests of Wildlife on Easy Street.

I'm here for the night, for the animal sanctuary's decidedly out-of-the-ordinary bed and breakfast. Don't expect the usual gourmet frittatas and adorable antique furniture; here you make your own Maxwell House and feed raw meat to a tiger.

Wildlife on Easy Street is a poetic name and a literal one: Easy Street is a dirt road off Gunn Highway, across the six-lane highway from Westfield Shoppingtown Citrus Park.

"We're not really open to the public in the usual sense," says Scott Lope, the general manager of Wildlife on Easy Street. Tours are given by reservation only, and visitors must be accompanied by a guide at all times and be at least 10 years old.

Wildlife on Easy Street is not primarily a zoo or a tourist attraction. Tours, ranging from a couple of hours to the overnight Expedition Easy Street, help raise money to support a sanctuary for about 200 animals, 170 of them cats small and large, from sand cats no bigger than a domestic tabby to cougars, lions and tigers.

Some came from circuses, roadside zoos and fur farms, but most are former pets, bought as cuddly kittens by people who woke up a few months later to find themselves living with a big, expensive, destructive predator capable of cheerfully eating them for lunch.

Such cats can't survive in the wild. Zoos don't need them, and circuses breed their own. Many of them end up euthanized or sold to canned hunt operations, where they're often shot in cages. It's too risky to hunt them; it could damage their trophy heads and pelts.

If they're lucky, they end up someplace like Easy Street.

Talk to the tiger

Julie Henly, right, is led by a staff member during training to use food to get the animals to obey commands.

About a dozen people are signed up for the 3 p.m. tour, and Lope is laying down the rules. Stay at least 3 feet away from the enclosures at all times. Don't reach across the knee-high fences there to remind you: "A lot of these animals are really good at getting you close enough to pull you in." No running, no teasing or feeding the animals. Break the rules and, Lope says, "we have no problem booting people off the tour."

And who's going to argue with a man who can order tigers around?

The group heads across a lawn to meet our first cat, Shere Khan, a male Bengal-Siberian cross tiger. He came to the sanctuary as a 4-month-old with severe nutritional deficiencies, which are common among pet tigers.

"His bones were so weak," Lope says, "the first time we fed him chicken, he broke his jaw."

At 8 years old, Shere Khan is the biggest cat in residence, at about 800 pounds. He and China Doll, a female Bengal, share a 3-acre, heavily wooded enclosure with a lake they can swim in.

Shere Khan's striped disguise is working; it's hard to see him lounging in the dappled shade until Lope calls him. He saunters over, making a grunting noise called "chuffing" that is a tiger's greeting.

Standing 3 feet from an 800-pound tiger is an interesting experience. On one level, I'm stunned by how beautiful he is and charmed by his friendly manner. He rubs his cheek against the fence and yawns like my cats at home.

But some primal corner of my brain stem is telling me that, fence or no, it remembers when creatures like Shere Khan ate creatures like me. A thrum of fear underlines the admiration.

The close encounter underlines another reason that wild cats don't make good pets. "They pee on everything, even each other," Lope says. China Doll proves it by ambling over and doing just that to Shere Khan. He yawns.

Soon, the aroma of all those predators marking their territory envelops us. Imagine a tomcat spraying your sofa, then multiply it by about a thousand. The scent is in the brush, the sand, the air. Even if none of the cats marks you -- and if you stand too close, they might -- the odor will go with you.

But our guide's stories about the cats are interesting enough to distract visitors from the pungent air. Lope, a 35-year-old Gulf War veteran, has worked at Wildlife on Easy Street for six years. He began as a volunteer. "I was working in a pathology lab at night and working here all day, and finally it just made more sense to be here full time."

Now he oversees about 30 volunteers and works 12-hour days, "and we don't even count the time we spend on research." But the cats are his passion, and he likes the "peaceful vibe of the place."

The sanctuary has lakes and sandy flats shaded by live oaks, slash pines and palm trees. Houses dot the property (Lope and several other staffers live onsite), and ducks, peacocks and house cats wander everywhere.

The wild cats live in big, sturdy enclosures of heavy-duty welded fencing, built by volunteers at an average cost of $5,000 each. Enclosure size varies according to the type of animal, but most large cats have 1,000 square feet or more.

Water-loving cats such as tigers have small pools with waterfalls; some cougars and leopards have trees. The snow leopards have air-conditioned dens. All the cats have shade, brush to hide in and dens to get out of the weather.

We stroll past cougars and tigers as well as dozens of smaller cats such as lynxes, servals, caracals and ocelots. The cats' reactions to visitors vary. Many were raised by people and still respond by approaching them.

"Cougars are the biggest cats that purr," Lope says, and Sylvester, a South American cougar, demonstrates with a rumble that sounds like a Harley's.

Other cats have been abused or haven't been socialized. The ones who suffered the worst treatment are kept away from visitors, Lope says. "We just don't want to expose them."

We finish the tour with "interaction," which means we go inside a cage with a bobcat. Raindance is a 10-year-old Northern bobcat, bought as a kitten from a fur farm, as were several other bobcats and lynxes.

Their cages bear signs: "Someone thought I'd make a nice fur coat. It takes 20 dumb animals to make a fur coat. It only takes one to wear it."

"I blame it on J.Lo," Lope says. "She's always got to be wearing that lynx coat."

"And not much else," one man on the tour chimes in.

Raindance stands still for our wary stroking, avoiding our eyes. She's three times the size of my biggest couch-potato house cat. Her tawny fur springs with life under my hand.

Fifty-six kittens

It was a bobcat that started the whole thing. Carole Lewis bought a kitten named Windsong 11 years ago.

General manager Scott Lope was a devoted volunteer before taking a full-time job at the animal sanctuary. He likes the “peaceful vibe of the place.”

A few months later, she and her husband, Don, went to a Minnesota breeder who sold bobcat kittens. When they arrived, they discovered that the breeder ran a fur farm. Kittens not sold as pets were "harvested" for their pelts the next year. He had 56 kittens.

"We bought all 56 of them," Lewis said, and brought them back to Florida.

From that beginning grew Wildlife on Easy Street. For several years, Lewis and her husband, a millionaire real estate investor, paid most of the sanctuary's expenses. In 1997, Don Lewis disappeared. Police found his van parked at a Pasco County airport. Despite their investigation, he has not been found. A court declared him dead last year.

When he vanished, Lewis says, "it was like half of the backbone of the place being lost. And the financial aspects were horrific." Suddenly, with Don Lewis' estate in limbo, she had to become a fundraiser.

But the sanctuary survived. Lewis' daughter, Jamie Veronica, is president. Lewis has "no official presence" at the sanctuary.

Although she began as a pet owner and sometimes bred wild cats, she now works to pass laws against the sale of wild animals as pets. "The ultimate goal would be to have no need for places like this," she says.

Wakeup roar

As the day tourists depart, a couple of other cabin guests and I head for the next adventure: feeding the cats.

Anissa Camp, 29, the sanctuary's education director, is our guide. She has worked at Wildlife on Easy Street for five years, first as a volunteer, then as one of the three paid staff members.

She loads a cart with big metal bowls of raw chicken legs, chunks of beef and something called ground zoo mix, which has lots of internal organs.

The first meal is for Shere Khan. No need to call him this time; he's striding along the fence looking hungry. We step inside the 3-foot fence but keep our distance from the inner one.

Camp shows us how to use long-handled metal tongs to grasp a chicken leg. "Choose a square in the fence and put it through the square. Don't worry about putting it in his mouth; he'll find it."

The tiger takes the chicken with a little growl, kind of like Homer Simpson with a doughnut, crouches over the small concrete pad used for feeding and with three loud crunches demolishes his food, bones and all. Then he puts out a huge pink tongue and carefully licks every bit of juice off the concrete.

Next we feed a cougar. "They're the most aggressive about food," Camp says, and with a snarl and a chomp, the cougar proves her right. The muscle behind the bite vibrates right through the tongs.

Our final customer is a black leopard, which we learn is not really black. Instead of an orange coat, these cats have one that is such a deep shade of coffee-bean brown, their black spots show only in bright light.

"They're the pickiest eaters," Camp says. The leopard sniffs the chicken leg, curls his lip and looks away, then gingerly takes the meat, dropping it on the concrete to sniff it over before eating it.

The guest cabins are in one building, a big green prefab barn on a southeast corner of the property, some distance from most of the animals. Each half of the building holds two guest bedrooms that share a bath, kitchenette and sitting area.

My room, dubbed the Kenya, has a leopard and lion motif, a queen-size bed and a huge TV. The kitchenette has a coffeemaker and a supply of muffins. Overnight guests observe additional rules: They must be at least 18, no alcohol is allowed on the property, and everyone must stay indoors after 10 p.m.

The three cats housed next to the cabins are recent arrivals, retired from Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus. Ringling has paid for retirement quarters for 11 big cats.

The new guys are Reno, a leopard whose circus specialty was riding in a chariot, and two tigers, Sabre and Flavio.

As I head out to get something to eat, Reno is shimmying through the brush and pouncing across his big pen, over and over.

After dinner, I drive back slowly along the dirt lane. As I creep between the lake's edge and the lion pens, my headlights fall on Sarabi rolling a 3-foot-wide, 125-pound play ball around as if it's weightless. Nikita, who came to the sanctuary after police in Tennessee found her chained to a wall in a crack house, stalks my Volkswagen along her fence.

I can see the two tigers as I near the cabins, but Reno is invisible. I know that he's in his enclosure, but as I fumble for the keyhole in the dark, the skin on my back shivers.

Safely inside, I'm looking out a window when suddenly I hear a low, too-close growl. It sounds as if it's below the window ledge. My knees go boneless.

Then I realize what's growling: my stomach. That will teach me to eat pad thai at the mall.

I do hear from Reno several times during the night. He keeps making a loud chugging noise, a series of grunts that last a minute or so and end in a little sigh. Lope says the next day, "That's his looking-for-a-girlfriend noise."

In between I hear a high-pitched cry that sounds like coyotes but is probably the little sand cats, whose pavilion is nearby. The peacocks let loose their ghost-in-the-woods wails once in a while. I read until late, a novel set in Havana in the '50s with one character, a mysterious, beautiful dancer named the Panther.

I set the alarm for 6:30, but at 6, roaring wakes me. I make coffee, pull on my aromatic T-shirt and jeans from the day before and go out to say good morning to Sabre, who is pacing around and bellowing. Reno is sleeping late, one spotted haunch showing through the opening into his den.

The barn, for overnight guests, holds two bedrooms in each half. And animals seem like they’re never far away. Sanctuary general manager Scott Lope, second from right, points out llamas to guests, from right, Julie Henly, Brian and Stacy Frost of Daytona Beach, and Jeff Henly.

Eye contact

Lope is waiting to take me on the rest of my tour. First we do operant conditioning, which means using food to get the animals to obey commands. This isn't stupid pet tricks; Lope says that training the cats to stand up or lie down on command makes it easier for veterinarians and the staff to monitor their health.

I get a chunk of beef impaled on a long, sharpened stick and instructions to hold it outside the wire until Bengali the tiger does what I tell him.

"Bengali, up!" I say in my best dog-training voice. Bengali looks at me out of the corner of his eye and grumbles.

"He doesn't want to get up. We don't make them," Lope says. As if I could. "Try down."

Down he goes, and he gets the meat. I try again with his brother, Samonti, in the next cage.

"Samonti, up!" Whoosh. I'm 5 foot 8, and I'm looking at the tiger's armpit. It's a reach to get the treat up to his mouth.

Though some cats at Wildlife on Easy Street were bred in the past, that has stopped. Lope says, "A real sanctuary does not breed or sell animals."

Why let people in at all? Some sanctuaries don't, but Lope says that Wildlife on Easy Street allows visitors for two reasons. "The big one is it raises money. We have to fight for every dollar." Lewis estimates that running the sanctuary costs about $430,000 a year.

"The other thing is education," Lope says. "If people see these cats, make that eye contact, maybe they'll think about it later."

He hopes the tours will make it less likely that wild cats end up as pets and more likely that they survive in the wild.

"People say, "Oh, you've made it so nice for them here,' " Lope says. "No matter how nice we make it, for them it's a prison cell."

If you go

Wildlife on Easy Street, 12802 Easy St., Tampa, is a nonprofit sanctuary accredited as an animal rescue facility by the Association of Sanctuaries. Tours are by reservation only, for ages 10 and older, at 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday-Friday and at 9:30 and 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Saturday; $20 donation. Feeding tours at dusk Monday-Saturday, $25. Bed and breakfast cabin for one or two people (must be 18 or older), $175. (813) 920-4130; www.wildlifeeasyst.com/

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