It’s ‘signing a death warrant’ to own exotic animals, says cop

If you were to find yourself in almost any kind of danger, Tim Harrison might be the guy you’d hope would show up.

A paramedic, firefighter, police officer, and instructor for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and natural disasters, Harrison covers just about all the bases. To add to his overachiever’s resume, he also happens to be an expert in handling dangerous critters. 

If Harrison were to rescue you from one of the latter, having spent much of the past 29 years responding to panic calls from all over the country about exotic animals gone AWOL and/or berserk, he might pepper you with a rapid-fire, impassioned lecture on why he believes it’s a terrible idea to own such creatures.

His experiences led him to found Outreach for Animals, a nonprofit whose mission he said is to advocate “for proper behavior around wildlife.”

At this spring's The Humane Society of the United States’ Genesis Awards, where The Elephant in the Living Room, a film following Harrison’s work took honors for Outstanding Documentary Film, the otherwise jovial veteran officer gave Animal Policy Examiner (APE) an earful on the topic.

In an interview of 20-plus minutes, wherein APE got approximately two and a half questions in edgewise, Harrison did not mince words in his descriptions of the horrors he has witnessed, nor of the individuals whose actions he said often lead to those horrors.

The following transcript, sans APE’s ultimately unnecessary questions, is essentially a manifesto from a man who has seen and lost too much, and wants you to know about it.

TIM HARRISON ON OWNERSHIP OF EXOTIC ANIMALS

‘They’re loving these animals to death’

I always tell people when you buy a bear, or a tiger, or a venomous snake, you just signed a death warrant, because one of you is going to die. It’s either going to be the animal or you.

These people are selfish to bring these animals into their houses. They do love them, which we show [in the documentary film]. But the problem is that they’re loving these animals to death.

And people say, “Oh Tim, it’s not that outrageous.” But just remember what you see on newscasts every month across the country now. There’s always a dangerous exotic animal incident that happens, and it’s getting more and more and more out of control. We need regulations. We need more people to step up and say, “Hey, wait a minute, tigers aren’t good pets.”

People always say a tiger turns on you. You know how you hear on the news about a tiger attacking somebody in their home? The tiger ‘”turns on them”? Tigers don’t turn on anybody. Tigers just go "tiger." That’s what they’re supposed to do. That’s what they’re made to do.

People don’t even get a book when they buy these animals. They believe what they see on TV. They don’t even bother to ask somebody that’s been around them. They bring them in and they find that that cute little tiger cub they had, or bear cub they had, grows up to be sexually mature, and he doesn’t need them anymore.

An African male lion, when he reaches about four years old, he’s taking over the pride. And for some reason somebody gets upset because it’s his turn to take over the pride. Wait a minute, that’s what the lion’s supposed to do, you know?

Or the guy gets bitten by his cobra. The cobra raises up: “Ssssss! I’m a cobra, leave me alone!” And they’re still stupid enough to reach in and get bitten, because they disrespect these animals.

So my goal is, leave the animals in the wild where they belong. We’ve got plenty of dogs and cats in these pounds out there that need homes, all right?  They’re waiting for homes. They want loving homes. They’re being put to death every day.

‘A boy constricted to death by a python’

I lost friends. I saw people seriously hurt. One of the things I always say in my lectures is, “You would be doing the same thing I’m doing if you saw a boy constricted to death by a python. Or if you had seen a little boy get his arm ripped off by a neighbor’s tiger. You’d be out here doing the same stinkin’ thing.”

The problem is that people don’t see that. They don’t get to hear the whole truth. They only see bits and pieces on the news, and they can’t visualize in their minds that this really happened in Ohio or California. 

“There’s no way that chimp ripped that woman’s face off,” [they say.] “I can’t believe it.”

When Oprah Winfrey showed her on the show, that woke up a lot of people about chimps and primates.  That woman—I give her 100 percent for courage to come on that show and not be mad at that chimp, because she realized it’s not that chimp’s fault. The chimp’s just doing what a chimp does.

But to get on that show and show people what happened, that took a lot of courage, and that changed a lot of minds. 

That opened the door for me to come in and speak a lot of times about these situations. What I’ve run into over all these years, that people won’t believe, this film opens the door for it now.

When people watch this film [The Elephant in the Living Room], you’ll watch it with your mouth open the entire time.  It’s an emotional roller coaster ride.

‘Nothing but nightmares’

The orange ribbon I’m wearing [on his lapel] represents a young man in the state of Ohio. He loved animals. He loved working with animals. He went in with the wrong person in Cleveland, Ohio that was allegedly an animal trainer, who had past problems with the USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates private ownership of exotic animals]. But this boy did not know that. 

He went in and started working with the animals, with the bears and everything else, and he thought he was doing the right thing, working with the animals that he loved.

And one day one of the bears attacked him inside the cage and killed him. It was a very savage death. The sad part about all that is that he loved that animal. And sometimes things happen. They love these animals to death.

It goes both ways, for the animal, and for the young man, because the bear was put down too. Usually when an animal kills a person, that animal is put to death too, so it was a sad story all around.

I’m wearing this orange ribbon on here in memory of the young man that died, but also hopefully to get people to wake up so that we don’t have any more happen down the road. So this ribbon represents him and the people in the future that I hope we can prevent this happening to.

I’m hoping that this film, and I’m hoping that these organizations that we’re speaking with now can push to keep people from wanting to bring these animals into their homes or even wanting to go and work with unaccredited people. 

If you really want to work with these animals, go through The Humane Society of the United States. Work through organizations that are accredited.  If you want to work at a zoo, work at an accredited zoo, the ones that are looked at, and The Humane Society checks them out. They’re good people.

Don’t go to unaccredited places. Nothing but nighmares.

‘These are real predators, not circus tricks’

If you remember a few years ago the young lady, this was in Kansas, that wanted to get her senior picture taken with a tiger. The tiger ripped her to shreds in front of her mother and everyone else.

One of the officers out there told me was that there were other people there with their kids wanting to get their pictures taken. This happened, and of course the police had to come in.  One parent complained, “When is my son going to get his picture taken with the tiger?” This was after one had just killed a young lady.

So we need to wake up.  We need to shake people up and realize that these are real predators. These are real animals, these are not circus tricks, they’re not sedated, they shouldn’t be surgically altered. These animals should be left in the wild.

These are basically time bombs in your home, and you don’t know what’s going to trigger them. It could be cologne you’re wearing that day. It could be a hat you’re wearing. It could be anything. You turned your back too quick.

When you go to the zoo, if you take your children and let them run past the tiger cage, watch what the tigers do. They immediately want to get that child. They immediately want to go get him. They have to. They’re forced to.

Please understand you can’t bring this animal into your home, because it’s going to do the same thing to your family.

‘She ended up dying when she opened up her new toy’

Since 1995 it’s become worse. Before that you might get a couple of calls a year.  Somebody might have a bear or a tiger. Then after 1995 when reality TV started, people wanted to imitate what the hosts were doing on these TV shows.

From 1995 to 1996 I had over 100 of the most dangerous and exotic animals in the world in my area of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. We had things like leopards. We had some snakes where I had to go to a book and look them up because I didn’t even know what they were—they’re so dangerous and exotic.

Whatever was shown on TV was immediately for sale at exotic animal auctions on the Internet, which scares me to death, because you can you can get a dangerous sort of a snake within 24 hours off the Internet, which a woman in Cincinnati found out the hard way.

She ended up dying when she opened up her new toy. They don’t think of them as real creatures, they think of them as what they see on TV. You know, guys playing with them around their head and playing with them like toys. She gets bitten, and she dies.

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It’s just ridiculous how easy it is to get these animals. And it started getting worse. So I started a nonprofit organization ten years ago called Outreach for Animals. That organization consists of police officers, firefighters, emergency room personnel, doctors, veterinarians—we get them all mixed in, and we’re trying to change people’s ideas about wild animals.

Leave them in the wild. You’re disrespecting them by bringing them into your home.

‘What good are regulations?’

So if we had regulations, this wouldn’t be happening right now.

People say, “Tim, what good are regulations?”

Here’s a perfect example. I had a law passed in my city of Dayton, Ohio and also Cleveland, Ohio. The year before [the law passed] I had 100 exotic dangerous animals that I’d taken out of that city. When the law passed, the very next year, I only had ten calls.  And now this year I’ve only had four.

Good people won’t buy a baby alligator like they see on TV for their son. They won’t buy a python, a tiger cub. Because good people go by the law.  And about 80 percent of the population are good people. 

I’ll take that percentage. We’ll work with the other 20 percent that sneak them. That’s how laws and regulations work.

‘Zoo directors were not doing a good job’

I spoke to all the zoo directors in the state of Ohio—they’re on board with us now. I’ll be speaking to the National Zoo Association, hopefully in September. They’re looking to get me on there. Because I was upset with the zoos. I told them, “You guys are not doing a good job. You’re not educating.”

We stand outside a zoo and we ask [patrons as they exit], “Do you want a monkey?” 

They answer, “Yeah!” “Do you want a tiger?” They say, “Yeah!”  But if they see to Mike Webber’s film, The Elephant in the Living Room, then you ask them the same questios, it’s “No!”

We had a zoo director in Ohio who said it beautifully. He said, “You guys have done in an hour and a half more education than I have done in 40 years as a zoo director.”

‘If I was covered with a bunch of cobras’

I am working with The Humane Society of the United States because these people know what they’re doing. Before I only trusted police officers and firefighters.  That’s the only people I trusted because if I was covered with a bunch of cobras, they’d always run to get me out, because that’s what they were trained to do—save lives. 

You’ve got to think, just from the public safety aspect, about every exotic animal call you see on TV. For example on the chimp that got loose in Connecticut, it turned out to be a police officer that was called on the scene and had to shoot the chimp as it ripped open his car door and came after him. 

At the San Francisco Zoo, when the tiger got loose and killed the young boy and attacked two other kids—it wasn’t the zoo that was called out. The zoo was there, but they couldn’t handle it. So who did they call?  The San Francisco Police Department. Two officers had to come out and shoot him with their handgun, and they were still upset about having to do that. They didn’t want—  They weren’t hired on to kill an exotic animal. That’s not what they’re here for. 

And it goes on and on and on in stories across the country.  In Ohio they had a S.W.A.T. team go into a residential area where a gentleman had an African lion. He [the lion] came around the corner and charged one of the S.W.A.T. officers.  He had to shoot it.  Well, he’s still under lawsuit right now by the owner and by other groups that say “Oh these cops shouldn’t be doing this.” 

I say, where’s the other groups when they call for them?  Where’s the zoo?  Where’s the other organizations when the police are begging for help? The police are always made out as the bad guys.

I’ve been a police officer, firefighter, paramedic for 29 years, and I have seen everything. I teach for Homeland Security, out of Texas A&M University, what they call Disaster City. And I teach a Unified Command for weapons of mass destruction and terrorism and natural disasters.

And we get police and officers and governors and mayors from all over the country come in, and they all have stories, and the sad part about this is that everybody condemns those cops when they have to shoot that tiger in front of the Ronald Reagan Library.  “Oh it didn’t have any claws!” [they say].

Well, where was the owner?  How dare he file a lawsuit against the police department, when he didn’t even come out and get his own tiger?

Public safety has to be first. I am always for the animal. I love these animals. I’m always for the animal. But I’m also for public safety. And the thing I fight for is to keep these animals in the wild and not have them in people’s homes.

‘I was on the dark side’

The documentary is opening up doors to get regulations passed in all these major communities and cities now. 

It’s time to step up and tell the truth and tell what really happens out there because I know the inside—law enforcement-wise, rescue-wise, emergency room doctor-wise—and I know what the veterinarians go through.

I also know what the exotic animal people do, because I used to be one of the guys that raised these animals.  I was on the dark side for years when I was younger, and then I found out this is not right.

I would get cubs. I actually had a facility where they would bring some from the zoos. A lot of unaccredited zoos and a few accredited ones would bring their animals to me, like wolves that were pregnant, and a tiger that was pregnant, and I had a facility where they would have their cubs, and then I would give them back to them. I’d get paid a fee, and I thought I was doing the right thing. 

Then I found out that these cubs were being sold at the Mt. Hope Exotic Animal Auction.  You see cubs, you see young babies. Especially unaccredited zoos. The accredited zoos don’t do it anymore. Years ago they did. That’s how we got white tigers. At the Cincinnati Zoo, white tigers. But accredited zoos don’t do that anymore. 

In the movie you’ll see Mt. Hope. The non-accredited zoos, which there are tons of them, you’ll see them dragging these animals out as fast as they can bring them out, and the crowd is just packed. These private owners are buying these animals to bring into their homes.

When I realized this was what was going on, I went over and I said, “Wait, I remember the zoo babies, but where are the zoo teenagers? Where’d they go?"

“Oh, we traded them off to another zoo,” [he was told].

They won’t tell you what the other zoo is. Then I started poking into these exotic animal auctions, and I found out, there they are. There’s the person from the nonaccredited zoo.  There they are holding them up to the crowd. You’ll see them walking around and auctioning them off.

So I realized from that point on, I can’t do this anymore.

I lost a friend. I saw people being hurt. I saw the animals being put down.

That’s the biggest thing.  If you saw a full-grown male tiger for no reason whatsoever have to be darted and given the juice—we call it giving the juice—and watch that thing take its last breath, it’ll destroy you.

If you have any kind of heart, I don’t care if you are an animal hater, someone that hates animals... I want these people to be forced watch that. It’s not in the film [The Elephant in the Living Room], but I want them to see something like that. Then will they say to themselves, “This is the right thing to do”?

They can’t. Even the worst people on the planet can’t say that.

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