| 1961 |
THE LADY AND THE TIGERS
* * *
SUSAN ORLEAN
On January 27, 1999, a tiger went walking through the township of Jackson, New Jersey. According to the Tiger Information Center, a tiger’s natural requirements are “some form of dense vegetative cover, sufficient large ungulate prey, and access to water.” By those measures, Jackson is really not a bad place to be a tiger. The town is halfway between Manhattan and Philadelphia, in a corner of Ocean County—an easy commute to Trenton and Newark, but still a green respite from the silvery sweep of electric towers and petroleum tanks to the north, and the bricked-in cities and mills farther south. Only forty-three thousand people live in Jackson, but it is a huge town, a bit more than a hundred square miles, all of it as flat as a tabletop and splattered with ponds and little lakes. A lot of Jackson is built up with subdivisions and Wawa food markets, or soon will be, but the rest is still primordial New Jersey pinelands of broom sedge and pitch pine and sheep laurel and peewee white oaks, as dense a vegetative cover as you could find anywhere. The local ungulates may not be up to what a tiger would find in more typical habitats, like Siberia or Madhya Pradesh—there are just the usual ornery and overfed pet ponies, panhandling herds of white-tailed deer, and a milk cow or two—unless you include Jackson’s Six Flags Wild Safari, which is stocked with zebras and giraffes and antelopes and gazelles and the beloved but inedible animal characters from Looney Tunes.
Nevertheless, the Jackson tiger wasn’t long for this world. A local woman preparing lunch saw him out her kitchen window, announced the sighting to her husband, and then called the police. The tiger slipped into the woods. At around five that afternoon, a workman at the Dawson Corporation complained about a tiger in the company parking lot. By seven, the tiger had circled the nearby houses. When he later returned to the Dawson property, he was being followed by the Jackson police, wildlife officials, and an airplane with an infrared scope. He picked his way through a few more back yards and the scrubby fields near Interstate 195, and then, unfazed by tranquillizer darts fired at him by a veterinarian, headed in the general direction of a middle school; one witness described seeing an “orange blur.” At around nine that night, the tiger was shot dead by a wildlife official, after the authorities had given up on capturing him alive. A pathologist determined that he was a young Bengal tiger, nine feet long and more than four hundred pounds. Nothing on the tiger indicated where he had come from, however, and there were no callers to the Jackson police reporting a tiger who had left home. Everyone in town knew that there were tigers in Jackson—that is, everyone knew about the fifteen tigers at Six Flags Wild Safari. But not everyone knew that there were other tigers in Jackson, as many as two dozen of them, belonging to a woman named Joan Byron-Marasek. In fact, Jackson has one of the highest concentrations of tigers per square mile anywhere in the world.
Byron-Marasek is famously and purposely mysterious. She rarely leaves the compound where she lives with her tigers, her husband, Jan Marasek, and scores of dogs, except to go to court. On videotapes made of her by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, she looks petite and unnaturally blond, with a snub nose and a small mouth and a startled expression. She is either an oldish-looking young person or a youngish-looking old person; evidently, she has no Social Security number, which makes her actual age difficult to establish. She has testified that she was born in 1955 and was enrolled in New York University in 1968; when it was once pointed out that this would have made her a thirteen-year-old college freshman, she allowed as how she wasn’t very good with dates. She worked for a while as an actress and was rumored to have appeared on Broadway in Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers, swinging naked from a chandelier. A brochure for her tiger preserve shows her wearing silver boots and holding a long whip and feeding one of her tigers, Jaipur, from a baby bottle. On an application for a wildlife permit, Byron-Marasek stated that she had been an assistant tiger trainer and a trapeze artist with Ringling Brothers and L. N. Fleckles; had trained with Doc Henderson, the illustrious circus veterinarian; and had read, among other books, The Manchurian Tiger, The World of the Tiger, Wild Beasts and Their Ways, My Wild Life, They Never Talk Back, and Thank You, I Prefer Lions.
The Maraseks moved to Jackson in 1976, with Bombay, Chinta, Iman, Jaipur, and Maya, five tigers they had got from an animal trainer named David McMillan. They bought land in a featureless and barely populated part of town near Holmeson’s Corner, where Monmouth Road and Millstone Road intersect. It was a good place to raise tigers. There was not much nearby except for a church and a few houses. One neighbor was a Russian Orthodox priest who ran a Christmas-tree farm next to his house; another lived in a gloomy bungalow with a rotting cabin cruiser on cement blocks in the front yard.
For a long time, there were no restrictions in New Jersey on owning wildlife. But beginning in 1971, after regular reports of monkey bites and tiger maulings, exotic-animal owners had to register with the state. Dangerous exotic animals were permitted only if it could be shown that they were needed for education or performance or research. Byron-Marasek held both the necessary New Jersey permit and an exhibitor’s license from the United States Department of Agriculture, which supervises animal welfare nationally.
After arriving in Jackson, Byron-Marasek got six more tigers—Bengal, Hassan, Madras, Marco, Royal, and Kizmet—from McMillan and from Ringling Brothers. The next batch—Kirin, Kopan, Bali, Brunei, Brahma, and Burma—were born in the back yard after Byron-Marasek allowed her male and female tigers to commingle. More cubs were born, and more tigers were obtained, and the tiger population of Holmeson’s Corner steadily increased. Byron-Marasek called her operation the Tigers Only Preservation Society. Its stated mission was, among other things, to conserve all tiger species, to return captive tigers to the wild, and “to resolve the human/tiger conflict and create a resolution.”
“I eat, sleep, and breathe tigers,” Byron-Marasek told a local reporter. “I never take vacations. This is my love, my passion.” A friend of hers told another reporter, “She walks among her tigers just like Tarzan. She told me, ‘I have scratches all along the sides of my rib cage and both my arms have been cut open, but they’re just playing.’ Now, that’s love.”
You know how it is—you start with one tiger, then you get another and another, then a few are born and a few die, and you start to lose track of details like exactly how many tigers you actually have. As soon as reports of the loose tiger came in, the police asked everyone in Jackson who had tigers to make sure that all of them were accounted for. Six Flags Wild Safari had a permit for fifteen and could account for all fifteen. At the Maraseks’, the counting was done by a group of police and state wildlife officers, who spent more than nine hours peering around tumbledown fences, crates, and sheds in the back yard. Byron-Marasek’s permit was for twenty-three tigers, but the wildlife officers could find only seventeen.
Over the years, some of her tigers had died. A few had succumbed to old age. Muji had an allergic reaction to an injection. Diamond had to be euthanized after Marco tore off one of his legs. Marco also killed Hassan in a fight in 1997, on Christmas Eve. Two other tigers died after eating road-killed deer that Byron-Marasek now thinks might have been contaminated with antifreeze. But that still left a handful of tigers unaccounted for.
The officers filmed the visit:
“Joan, I have to entertain the notion that there are five cats loose in town, not just one,” an officer says on the videotape.
Byron-Marasek’s lawyer, Valter Must, explains to the group that there was some sloppy math when she filed for the most recent permit.
The officers shift impatiently and make a few notes.
“For instance, I don’t always count my kids, but I know when they’re all home,” Must says.
“You don’t have twenty-three of them,” one of the officers says.
“Exactly,” Must says.
“You’d probably know if there were six missing,” the
officer adds.
“I would agree,” Must says.
On the tape, Byron-Marasek insists that no matter how suspicious the discrepancy between her permit and the tiger count appears, the loose tiger was not hers. No, she does not know whom it might have belonged to, either. And, gentlemen, don’t stick your fingers into anything, please: I’m not going to tell you again.
The officers ask to see Byron-Marasek’s paperwork. She tells them that she is embarrassed to take them into her house because it is a mess. The tiger quarters look cheerless and bare, with dirt floors and chain-link fences and blue plastic tarps flapping in the January wind, as forlorn as a bankrupt construction site. During the inspection, a ruckus starts up in one of the tiger pens. Byron-Marasek, who represents herself as one of the world’s foremost tiger authorities, runs to see what it is, and reappears, wild-eyed and frantic, yelling, “Help me! Help! They’re going to … they’re going to kill each other!” The officers head toward the tiger fight, but then Byron-Marasek waves to stop them and screams, “No, just Larry! Just Larry!”—meaning Larry Herrighty, the head of the permit division, about whom she will later say, in an interview, “The tigers hate him.”
The day of the tiger count was the first time that the state had inspected the Maraseks’ property in years. New Jersey pays some attention to animal welfare—for instance, it closed the Scotch Plains Zoo in 1997 because of substandard conditions—but it doesn’t have the resources to monitor all its permit holders. There had been a few complaints about the tigers: in 1983, someone reported that the Maraseks played recordings of jungle drums over a public-address system between 4 and 6 A.M., inciting their tigers to roar. The State Office of Noise Control responded by measuring the noise level outside the compound one night, and Byron-Marasek was warned that there would be monitoring in the future, although it doesn’t appear that anyone ever came back. Other complaints, about strange odors, were never investigated. Her permit was renewed annually, even as the number of animals increased.
Anyone with the type of permit Byron-Marasek had must file information about the animals’ work schedule, but the state discovered that it had no records indicating that her tigers had ever performed, or that anyone had attended an educational program at Tigers Only. The one tiger with a public profile was Jaipur, who weighed more than a thousand pounds, and who, according to his owner, was listed in the Guinness World Records as the largest Siberian tiger in captivity. Later, in court, Byron-Marasek also described Marco as “a great exhibit cat”—this was by way of explaining why she doted on him, even though he had killed Diamond and Hassan—but, as far as anyone could tell, Marco had never been exhibited.
Now the state was paying attention to the Tigers Only Preservation Society, and it wasn’t happy with what it found. In court papers, D.E.P. investigators noted, “The applicant’s tiger facility was a ramshackle arrangement with yards (compounds), chutes, runs, and shift cages … some of which were covered by deteriorating plywood, stockade fencing and tarps, etc.… The periphery fence (along the border of the property), intended to keep out troublemakers, was down in several places. There was standing water and mud in the compound. There was mud on the applicant’s tigers.” There were deer carcasses scattered around the property, rat burrows, and a lot of large, angry dogs in separate pens near the tigers. Suddenly, one wandering tiger seemed relatively inconsequential; the inspectors were much more concerned about the fact that Byron-Marasek had at least seventeen tigers living in what they considered sorry conditions, and that the animals were being kept not for theatrical or educational purposes but as illegal pets. Byron-Marasek, for her part, was furious about the state’s inspections. “The humiliation we were forced to suffer is beyond description,” she said later, reading from a prepared statement at a press conference outside her compound. “Not only did they seriously endanger the lives of our tigers—they also intentionally attempted to cut off their food supply.”
(illustration credit 15.4)
The one suspicion that the state couldn’t confirm was that the loose tiger had belonged to Joan Byron-Marasek. DNA tests and an autopsy were inconclusive. Maybe he had been a drug dealer’s guard animal, or a pet that had got out of hand and was dropped off in Jackson in the hope that the Tiger Lady would take him in. And then there were the conspiracy theorists in town who believed that the tiger had belonged to Six Flags, and that his escape was covered up because the park is the biggest employer and the primary attraction in town. In the end, however, the tiger was simply relegated to the annals of suburban oddities—a lost soul, doomed to an unhappy end, whose provenance will never be known.
It is not hard to buy a tiger. Only eight states prohibit the ownership of wild animals; three states have no restrictions whatsoever, and the rest have regulations that range from trivial to modest and are barely enforced. Exotic-animal auction houses and animal markets thrive in the Midwest and the Southeast, where wildlife laws are the most relaxed. In the last few years, dealers have also begun using the Internet. One recent afternoon, I browsed the Hunts Exotics Web site, where I could have placed an order for baby spider monkeys ($6,500 each, including delivery); an adult female two-toed sloth ($2,200); a Northern cougar female with blue eyes, who was advertised as “tame on bottle”; a black-capped capuchin monkey, needing dental work ($1,500); an agouti paca; a porcupine; or two baby tigers “with white genes” ($1,800 each). From there I was linked to more tiger sites—Mainely Felids and Wildcat Hideaway and NOAH Feline Conservation Center—and to pages for prospective owners titled “I Want a Cougar!” and “Are You Sure You Want a Monkey?” It is so easy to get a tiger, in fact, that wildlife experts estimate that there are at least fifteen thousand pet tigers in the country—more than seven times the number of registered Irish setters or Dalmatians.
One reason that tigers are readily available is that they breed easily in captivity. There are only about six thousand wild tigers left in the world, and three subspecies have become extinct just in the last sixty years. In zoos, though, tigers have babies all the time. The result is thousands of “surplus tigers”—in the zoo economy, these are animals no longer worth keeping, because there are too many of them, or because they’re old and zoo visitors prefer baby animals to mature ones. In fact, many zoos began breeding excessively during the seventies and eighties when they realized that baby animals drew big crowds. The trade in exotic pets expanded as animals were sold to dealers and game ranches and unaccredited zoos once they were no longer cute. In 1999, the San Jose Mercury News reported that many of the best zoos in the country, including the San Diego Zoo and the Denver Zoological Gardens, regularly disposed of their surplus animals through dealers. Some zoo directors were so disturbed by the practice that they euthanized their surplus animals: according to the Mercury News, the director of the Detroit Zoo put two healthy Siberian tigers to sleep, rather than risk their ending up as mistreated pets or on hunting ranches. Sometimes dealers buy surplus animals just for butchering. An adult tiger, alive, costs between two hundred and three hundred dollars. A tiger pelt sells for two thousand dollars, and body parts from a large animal, which are commonly used in aphrodisiacs, can bring five times as much.
Between 1990 and 2000, Jackson’s population increased by almost a third, and cranberry farms and chicken farms began yielding to condominiums and center-hall Colonials. It was probably inevitable that something would come to limn the town’s changing character, its passage from a rural place to something different—a bedroom community attached to nowhere in particular, with clots of crowdedness amid a sort of essential emptiness; a place practically exploding with new people and new roads that didn’t connect to anything, and fresh, clean sidewalks of cement that still looked damp; the kind of place made possible by highways and telecommuting, and made necessary by the high cost of living in bigger cities, and made desirable, ironically, by the area’s quickly vanishing rural character. A tiger in town had, in a roundabout way, made all of this clear.
A CAT’S DINNER<
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On the Seventh Avenue I.R.T. the other day, an ordinary-looking man in a raincoat and fedora was chatting with his ordinary-looking seatmate. He lived alone, he said, with his cat.
“Oh,” said his seatmate. “What kind of cat?”
“A big one,” replied the man, indicating with his hands something four feet long and three feet high, and adding, with matter-of-fact pride, that occasionally the cat got loose in the streets and had knocked down many old ladies and one policeman.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 27
