Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 16, 1994 TAG: 9401160050
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WEYERS CAVE LENGTH: Long
In the mornings, the cat is taken outside and put in a chain-link pen 16 feet by 20 feet. He sharpens his claws on logs, chews on rag toys, naps occasionally, and sits on a big wooden spool to survey his surroundings.
He spends his nights inside, in a large plastic crate, the kind made to carry pet dogs.
He's well taken care of, watered and fed regularly, and watched over by the veterinarian here at the Wildlife Center of Virginia.
The staff and volunteers call him, simply, "The Cat," in a somewhat vain attempt not to get attached to the 6-month-old mountain lion.
They can't keep him. They can't let him go. And they can't find a permanent home for him.
They might end up having to euthanize him.
"Unfortunately, this animal never should have been born," says Stuart Porter, director of veterinarian services at the center, which has had the animal for 3 1/2 months.
The Department of Game and Inland Fisheries seized the cub in September from a Virginia Tech student who was keeping it at her Blacksburg home without the necessary permits. It wound up at the wildlife center.
"You'd be amazed how many people have these as pets," Porter says. "It's the Walt Disney/Bambi syndrome."
Mountain lions - also called cougars, pumas and panthers - are irresistibly cute as kittens. But they grow into big cats, with big teeth, powerful claws and wild instincts that cannot be tamed.
"No human being can stop a cougar," Porter says. The cat will weigh 150 pounds when he's full grown, "and it's going to hurt someone."
The center doesn't have the facilities or money to keep such an animal. Besides, its mission is to rehabilitate injured or sick animals and return them to the wild.
That's not an option for this animal, whose forebears were born and raised in captivity for several generations.
"Essentially, they lose some of that genetic information they need to survive" in the wild, Porter says. "They lose their fear of predators. And they lose their fear of humans, and they get into trouble."
The cat's only hope is to be placed in a licensed zoo or similar facility - but the chances are slim.
Eastern mountain lions are an endangered species. Considered all but extinct, there's only a few dozen living in Florida.
Western mountain lions, such as this cat, are more populous and range freely out West. On the zoo circuit, they're a "dime a dozen," center director Ed Clark says.
Mill Mountain Zoo has one, and doesn't want another. Clark's already tried there. He's in touch with zoos from California to Ohio, and so far, no takers.
But turning it over to an individual, no matter how well-meaning or skilled at handling wildlife, is out of the question, Clark says.
"We're at our wits' end."
The cub's journey began in Rockbridge County, where it was born at the Natural Bridge Zoo in August. Owner Karl Mogensen says it was the only cub in the litter.
He gave it to Anne Georgiades, a freshman veterinary student who had worked for him, to raise. He says he planned to take the cat back after six or eight months.
But Georgiades says she took the week-old cub - who had been rejected by his mother hours after being born - with the understanding that she would transport it to an animal dealer in Tennessee who was buying the cat from Mogensen.
When the deal fell through, Georgiades was left holding the cat. So she took it back to her home in the Hethwood section of Blacksburg.
Georgiades says the zoo told her to keep the cat while they tried to work things out with the Tennessee dealer or find it another home.
Shortly after, in September, the Blacksburg Police Department and state game wardens, acting on a tip, confiscated the cub. Georgiades was charged with having a non-native species without a permit and keeping a wild animal in the town limits, both misdemeanors.
But the wardens couldn't return the cub to Mogensen because, they discovered, he, too, did not have a proper permit.
Maj. Joe Cooke, assistant chief of law enforcement for the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, says Mogensen's permit had been expired for at least 10 years.
"I said, `Gee, I never even realized this,' " Mogensen says. "It was a total oversight on my part."
Mogensen, an animal dealer and exhibitor who has operated the for-profit zoo for more than 20 years, was not charged.
"It was more or less an administrative matter," explains L.L. Wensel Jr., the warden in Montgomery County who was the lead law enforcer in the case. "I don't think it was a gross negligence. Just some things [Mogensen] had let lapse."
And there's another thing, he adds. The cub was born to a mountain lion that the department had confiscated about 12 years ago. Not knowing what to do with it, the department gave it to Mogensen. He had agreed to keep it at his own expense as a ward of the state.
"It's kind of a touchy thing," Wensel says.
Georgiades feels that she's been made the scapegoat and was treated unfairly by the authorities. "I had no clue, you know," says the 20-year-old student. "I was following the rules of my employer."
The ordeal has distracted her from schoolwork, and she says her grades have suffered. She worries it could ruin her career. She pleaded not guilty and did more than 20 hours of volunteer work at the Montgomery County Humane Society in the fall.
On Thursday, the charges against her were dismissed in General District Court, and her lawyer is trying to get her record expunged.
Meanwhile, the department has reissued Mogensen an exhibitor's permit, and told him he's allowed to pick up the cat from the wildlife center.
Mogensen says he is willing to take the cat back.
But Clark, the wildlife center director, says Mogensen told him last month to keep the animal - after finding out the center would bill him more than $1,000 for medical treatment, food and board.
So, Clark continues to call zoos and parks around the country in hopes someone will want the mountain lion.
The fate of this particular cat only scratches the surface of what some experts believe is a more serious problem.
Georgiades says she never intended to keep the cub, whom she named Kal, because it's not right to turn wild animals into pets.
But some people think otherwise.
A couple of years ago, the Pet City animal store in Roanoke had a mountain lion cub on exhibit that had come from Natural Bridge Zoo, says manager Denise Spangler. A lot of people wanted to buy the cub, although it was not for sale. The store eventually donated the animal to a South Carolina zoo.
"We get lots of calls for cats," Spangler says. The more exotic species can cost up to $10,000, she says.
Carolann Curry, animal care supervisor at Mill Mountain Zoo, also gets calls. But instead of wanting to buy, people usually call her trying to unload cougars.
Last year, she got a call from West Virginia authorities who had seized a mountain lion and were trying to place it. She recently got a call from someone who offered her $1,000 to take a 6-month-old mountain lion cub.
Late last year, a truck driver called her to find out where he could get commercially sold food for big cats. He had a pet cougar kitten and apparently planned on driving around with it in his cab, Curry says.
She tried to talk him out of it. Once the cat reaches sexual maturity, she told him, it will always try to establish dominance. She didn't tell the trucker where he could find the food.
The Virginia game and fisheries department issues exhibitor permits to zoos like Mill Mountain and parks, aquariums and other facilities that have mountain lions and other unusual animals for educational purposes. There are 17 such permits in the state.
The agency also issues exotic-species permits to individuals for animals not native to Virginia. Most are for rare birds, according to Bob Ellis with the game department, and none for big cats.
"The whole purpose [of the permits] is to keep individuals from having the cats to begin with," Cooke says. "There's no legitimate reason we can think for an individual to have one."
No legitimate reason, maybe, but a psychological one, Curry says. Having a mountain lion or other big cat for a pet is "ego on the end of a chain." More often than not, though, the cats outgrow their appeal, she says. Even declawed, defanged, and spayed or neutered, full-grown big cats are a handful.
When the owners try to give them to a zoo, they find out the zoos don't want them. Wildlife experts suspect that sometimes these mountain lions are let loose in the wild.
Once the most widespread mammals of the Western Hemisphere, the mountain lion was hunted for bounty and eradicated from the East. The last one killed in Virginia was in 1882. Over the next 75 years, no evidence of mountain lions in the East existed, although they regained a foothold out West.
Since the late '60s, there have been a growing number of unconfirmed sightings throughout Appalachia. Experts believe that these phantom cats are likely the Western subspecies, either escaped from zoos or deliberately dumped in the wild.
"It's extremely common to see large cats as pets," says Richard Farinato, director of the captive wildlife protection program with the Humane Society of the United States. "There's definitely lots of illegal cats out there."
Nobody knows exactly how many, Farinato says. There's no central clearinghouse or reporting requirements at the federal level.
But he gets clippings every week from papers around the country about big cats - tigers, African lions or North American cougars - escaping from their owners and attacking dogs, livestock and children.
"We all have heard numerous horror stories," Farinato says.
Most states allow people to own big cats, so long as they get a permit. Only a few, like Connecticut, are more stringent in regulating ownership of wildlife, he says.
But all the permitting and regulating and criminal arrests won't help "The Cat" at the Weyers Cave wildlife center. His fate is more or less sealed - death by lethal injection or life cooped up in a cage.
Says Porter, the center's veterinarian: "The bottom line is, the animal is going to suffer for all of this."
by CNB