Lions and tigers shot in Zanesville; owner freed them

ANDY BROWNFIELD

KANTELE FRANKO

Asso­ci­ated Press

ZANESVILLE — Sheriff’s deputies shot nearly 50 wild ani­mals — includ­ing 18 rare Ben­gal tigers and 17 lions — in a big-game hunt across the Ohio coun­try­side Wednes­day after the owner of an exotic-animal park threw their cages open and com­mit­ted sui­cide in what may have been one last act of spite against his neigh­bors and police.

As home­own­ers ner­vously hid indoors, offi­cers armed with high-powered rifles and shoot-to-kill orders fanned out through fields and woods to hunt down 56 ani­mals that had been turned loose from the Musk­ingum County Ani­mal Farm by owner Terry Thomp­son before he shot him­self to death Tuesday.

After an all-night hunt that extended into Wednes­day after­noon, 48 ani­mals were killed. Six oth­ers — three leop­ards, a griz­zly bear and two mon­keys — were cap­tured and taken to the Colum­bus Zoo. A wolf was later found dead, leav­ing a mon­key as the only ani­mal still on the loose.

Those destroyed included six black bears, two griz­zlies, a baboon and three moun­tain lions.

“It’s like Noah’s Ark wreck­ing right here in Zanesville, Ohio,” lamented Jack Hanna, TV per­son­al­ity and for­mer direc­tor of the Colum­bus Zoo.

Hanna defended the sheriff’s deci­sion to kill the ani­mals but said the deaths of the Ben­gal tigers were espe­cially tragic. There are only about 1,400 of the endan­gered cats left in the world, he said.

“When I heard 18 I was still in dis­be­lief,” he said. “The most mag­nif­i­cent crea­ture in the entire world, the tiger is.”

As the hunt dragged on out­side of Zanesville, pop­u­la­tion 25,000, schools closed in the mostly rural area of farms and widely spaced homes 55 miles east of Colum­bus. Par­ents were warned to keep chil­dren and pets indoors. And flash­ing signs along high­ways told motorists, “Cau­tion exotic ani­mals” and “Stay in vehicle.”

Offi­cers were ordered to kill the ani­mals instead of try­ing to bring them down with tran­quil­iz­ers for fear that those hit with darts would escape in the dark­ness before they dropped and would later regain consciousness.

“These ani­mals were on the move, they were show­ing aggres­sive behav­ior,” Sher­iff Matt Lutz said. “Once the night­fall hit, our biggest con­cern was hav­ing these ani­mals roaming.”

The sher­iff would not spec­u­late why Thomp­son killed him­self and why he left open the cages and fences at his 73-acre pre­serve, doom­ing the ani­mals he seemed to love so much.

Thomp­son, 62, had had repeated run-ins with the law and his neigh­bors. Lutz said that the sheriff’s office had received numer­ous com­plaints since 2004 about ani­mals escap­ing onto neigh­bors’ prop­erty. The sheriff’s office also said that Thomp­son had been charged over the years with ani­mal cru­elty, ani­mal neglect and allow­ing ani­mals to roam.

He had got­ten out of fed­eral prison just last month after serv­ing a year for pos­sess­ing unreg­is­tered guns.

John Ellen­berger, a neigh­bor, spec­u­lated that Thomp­son freed the ani­mals to get back at neigh­bors and police. “Nobody much cared for him,” Ellen­berger said.

Angie McEl­fresh, who lives in an apart­ment near the farm and hun­kered down with her fam­ily in fear, said “it could have been an ‘f-you’ to every­body around him.”

Thomp­son had res­cued some of the ani­mals at his pre­serve and pur­chased many oth­ers, said Colum­bus Zoo spokes­woman Patty Peters.

It was not imme­di­ately clear how Thomp­son man­aged to sup­port the pre­serve and for what pur­pose it was oper­ated, since it was not open to the pub­lic. But Thomp­son had appeared on the “Rachael Ray Show” in 2008 as an ani­mal han­dler for a zool­o­gist guest, said show spokes­woman Lau­ren Nowell.

The sheriff’s office started get­ting calls Tues­day evening that wild ani­mals were loose just west of Zanesville. Deputies went to the ani­mal pre­serve and found Thomp­son dead and all the cages open. Sev­eral aggres­sive ani­mals were near his body and had to be shot, the sher­iff said.

Sheriff’s Deputy Jonathan Merry was among the first to respond Tues­day. He said he shot a num­ber of ani­mals, includ­ing a gray wolf and a black bear. He said the bear charged him and he fired his pis­tol, killing it with one shot when it was about 7 feet away.

“All these ani­mals have the abil­ity to take a human out in the length of a sec­ond,” said Merry, who called him­self an ani­mal lover but said he knew he was pro­tect­ing the community.

“What a tragedy,” said Barb Wolfe, a vet­eri­nar­ian with The Wilds, a nearby zoo-sponsored wild ani­mal pre­serve. She said she man­aged to hit a tiger with a tran­quil­izer dart, but the ani­mal charged toward her and then turned and began to flee before the drug could take effect, and deputies shot the big cat.

At an after­noon news con­fer­ence, the sher­iff said that the dan­ger had passed and that peo­ple could move around freely again, but that the mon­key would prob­a­bly be shot because it was believed to be car­ry­ing a her­pes disease.

“It was like a war zone with all the shoot­ing and so forth with the ani­mals,” said Sam Kopchak, who was out­side Tues­day after­noon when he saw Thompson’s horses act­ing up. Kopchak said he turned and saw a male lion lying down on the other side of a fence.

“The fence is not going to be a fence that’s going to hold an African lion,” Kopchak said.

Danielle Berkheimer said she was ner­vous as she drove home Tues­day night and afraid to let her two dogs out in the yard.

“When it’s 300-pound cats, that’s scary,” she said. She said it had been odd Tues­day night to see no one out around town, and the signs warn­ing dri­vers to stay in their cars were “surreal.”

Some towns­peo­ple were sad­dened by the deaths. At a nearby Moose Lodge, Bill Weiser said: “It’s break­ing my heart, them shoot­ing those animals.”

Ohio has some of the nation’s weak­est restric­tions on exotic pets and among the high­est num­ber of injuries and deaths caused by them. At least nine peo­ple have been injured since 2005 and one per­son was killed, accord­ing to Born Free USA, an ani­mal advo­cacy group.

On Wednes­day, the Humane Soci­ety of the United States crit­i­cized Gov. John Kasich for allow­ing a statewide ban on the buy­ing and sell­ing of exotic pets to expire in April. The orga­ni­za­tion urged the state to imme­di­ately issue emer­gency restrictions.

“How many inci­dents must we cat­a­log before the state takes action to crack down on pri­vate own­er­ship of dan­ger­ous exotic ani­mals?” Wayne Pacelle, pres­i­dent and CEO, said in a statement.

Kasich said Wednes­day dur­ing a meet­ing of Dix Com­mu­ni­ca­tions edi­tors: “Clearly, we need tougher laws. We haven’t had them in this state. Nobody’s dealt with this, and we will. And we’ll deal with it in a com­pre­hen­sive way.”

Bar­ney Long, an expert at the World Wildlife Fund, noted that tigers in gen­eral are endan­gered. He said there appear to be fewer of them liv­ing in the wild than there are in cap­tiv­ity in the U.S. alone. Over the last cen­tury, the world­wide pop­u­la­tion has plunged from about 100,000 in the wild to as few as 3,200, he said.

More than half are Ben­gal tigers, which live in iso­lated pock­ets across Nepal, Bhutan, Myan­mar, India and Bangladesh, he said in a tele­phone interview

“The tragic shoot­ing of 18 tigers in Ohio really high­lights what is hap­pen­ing on a daily basis to tigers in the wild through­out Asia,” Long added in an email. “Their num­bers are being dec­i­mated by poach­ing and habi­tat loss, and that is the real trav­esty here.”

Posted by AP News on Oct 19 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.