CAGED TIGERS

Lynn and her husband have a little house but it was designed with the cats in mind. One of the rooms is called the cat room. Little kittens are allowed in the house until they start scent marking. Older cats live in outdoor pens, one of which connects to the Culvers bedroom window so the cats can come in and hang some mornings.

This little guy is in a lot of trouble.

The kitties eat mostly chickens and vitamins. Every now and then, they get a live one but mostly they don't get to kill their prey because it's uncool to foster the predatory instincts of wild cats you let live in your house. Lynn also has seven mountain lions (one is a cancer survivor that "hates [her] guts"), and they eat old cows and cows with prolapsed uteruses from nearby farms. A prolapsed uterus is when the cow is giving birth, and the when the baby comes out of its stomach the stomach comes out too, and turns inside out, and dangles out of its butt down in the hay along with the baby. Did you know that some farmers will stuff the stomach back inside the butt, sew up the hole, and sell the cow to ignorant tourists from the city? It is a mean, mean world.

This guy on the right is my favorite.

But these guys come in close second. These are some servals. They are affectionate, timid, and fast. Right now they're inside but they have an outdoor thing too.

Yeah, so that's this guy.

Now this is Larry Wallach. It is impossible to get out of him how many tigers he owns. The number goes from 50 and a bear to – well it vacillates. He's the guy who took out that tiger that that guy had in his apartment. He said the tiger was in great condition.

Ha-ha-ha. Tiger in your trunk. ...ah...

Did you know that exotic-animal owners are really reluctant to talk to journalists? A lot of monkey owners I talked to not only had breathy, quiet voices, but also told me the same exact story, about how Mike Wallace did a piece on this yearly monkey festival-I can't remember what it is called-where all the monkey owners get together for a picnic and bring their monkeys along in costume. (They all mentioned this story to me. Like it's still burning them up. This is monkey owners, not wild cat owners. The wild cat owners are different.) Anyway, just so you know, Mike Wallace told these guys who like to dress their monkeys up and eat a picnic lunch (guys who are kind of on the fringe among even monkey owners) that his piece was going to be a fun piece, and then he twisted up the evidence to make the party seem insane. We told the owners that we wanted to let the images speak for themselves, and the monkey guys were like "yeah, we'll just pass on that one." (Just to hold your hand here, we think that the pictures do speak for themselves. You can see, if you look very carefully, that there are different situations here.)

Larry, the owner of this guy here, has never been bitten by a tiger. He says wild animals are just like people, and you don't go in their cage when they're mad.

AMIE BARRODALE