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Big cats are easier to find than you might think. I recently struck up a conversation with the chef at my favorite sushi joint in New York City. He asked what I'd been working on, and I filled him in on a bit of the Joe Exotic story and the big cat trade. To my surprise, he nodded along knowingly: ?Oh yeah, a buddy of mine just got a serval!? Celebrity culture is another hot spot for exotic animal ownership. This past fall, Justin Bieber reportedly spent $35,000 on two savannah cats and created a dedicated Instagram page that quickly amassed more than 500,000 followers. When PETA criticized Bieber's new pet choice, he posted a statement on his Instagram story telling the nonprofit group to ?suck it? and ?focus on real problems.?
Shopping for an unconventional animal used to mean scanning the classified sections of newspapers or fliers on the cluttered billboards at grocery stores and gas stations. But those analog methods of sale have long since given way to people hawking large cats in ways that are now more traditionally modern: closed Facebook groups and exotic pet websites. Getting an ocelot or a cheetah can be as easy as sending a DM or text, agreeing on a price, and setting a pick-up date. Depending on what state you live in, owning one of these animals might be entirely legal. And even if it's not, there's almost always a way to sidestep the rules, which can be confusing and are rarely enforced.
Save for a handful of regulations pertaining to animals listed in the Endangered Species Act (ESA), there's almost no oversight of big cat ownership by the federal government. The Animal Welfare Act is supposed to ensure humane treatment of big cats and other captive animals, but the inspectors are overworked and many of the rules are weak, vague, or both. Although the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) does technically require a permit to sell endangered species such as tigers, lions, leopards, or jaguars across state lines, unscrupulous sellers and buyers often don't want to bother with permits and deal in untraceable cash payments. At trial, one buyer even testified to participating in sales marked as ?donations.? Joe Exotic used this tactic for years to evade the gaze of law enforcement. He wasn't the only one. At Joe's trial, that same tiger owner testified: ?Everybody marks donation.?
Same goes for regulations at the state level: Loopholes abound in the legislative patchwork governing big cat ownership. ?There's lots of ways tigers have been technically regulated on paper but in practice, not so much,? Nasser said. Roughly two thirds of states have some sort of regulations prohibiting private big cat ownership as pets. In 10 states, anyone can own a lion or tiger as long as they pay as little as $30 for a license from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Four states ? North Carolina, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Oklahoma ? have no laws on the books at all.
After a busy few weeks in Valheim's viking purgatory, my friends and I are waiting out the next update by returning to League of Legends, which has been our collective game of choice for much of the past 10 years. I also DM two Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, one of which Ben T is constantly trying to derail via his silver-tongued bard.
Who am I? After a few years writing for my university newspaper and with a shiny new gaming PC on my desk, my games writing career kicked off when I joined PCGamesN in the summer of 2017. Over the following two years, I wrote more about League of Legends than anyone outside Riot (or at least that's how it felt), and spent an extremely jet-lagged weekend in Seattle for Valve's reveal of Artifact. That was a more impressive anecdote in 2018 than it is now, but I did get to meet Gabe Newell.
In 2019, I left PCGN to become Kotaku UK's news editor, from where I eventually joined Gamesradar in 2020.
What do I do on GamesRadar+? As Deputy News Editor, I'm on hand to help out the news team, writing articles and desperately trying to trick Ben into letting me write about my favourite PC games.
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