hammock that volunteers at the sanctuary have jury-rigged for him. He climbs into the hammock and falls fast asleep, oblivious of his narrow escape from a probable life of neglect or abuse.
“Maybe the guy wanted Buster for some roadside attraction—who knows?” says Craig, a Boulder native who created this sanctuary for exotic wild animals out of a family farm. “But breeders normally take the cubs from their mother just after birth, and they go through separation anxiety if someone isn’t with them all the time.” In the wild, mother bears provide constant care for the first two years of a cub’s life, and that means someone at the sanctuary has to stay with Buster around the clock. But no one seems to mind. When Buster grows big enough, he’ll be transferred onto the sanctuary’s 10-acre bear habitat with the other resident bears.
Another good-sized enclosure houses a gaunt African lioness, Mara, a recent rescue from the Hollywood movie industry. Craig explains that Mara will stay in the acclimation area until she gains weight and strength; then she’ll move to one of the larger lion habitats on the 160-acre grassland compound, to live with her own kind.
It may seem strange to see a bear cub and a lioness so close together. In fact, Buster and Mara are just two of more than 150 animals living at the sanctuary. In addition to African lions and black bears, there are grizzly bears, mountain lions, leopards, bobcats, African serval cats, wolves and many tigers. Despite the creatures’ diversity, the circumstances that brought them here are all too common. Exotic animals are big business in the entertainment industry, as well as at roadside attractions, portrait studios and county fairs, and the laws regulating them are convoluted and often impotent.
“The illegal exotic animal trade, illegal drugs and armaments are the top three sources of illegal profits in the world today,” says Toni Scalera, the sanctuary’s development and public affairs director. “It’s a multibillion-dollar business that includes breeding and selling the animals and their parts—hides, teeth, paws, bear gallbladders.” Despite a 2003 federal law that prohibits transporting exotic animals across state lines (unless the owner is USDA-licensed for commerce or breeding, or as a sanctuary), laws on private ownership vary from state to state and sometimes even by county. “The Humane Society says there are about 7,000 tigers alone in private hands in the U.S.—twice as many tigers as in the wild—but the laws protecting them are pretty lax,” Scalera says.
Tales of Tragedy
Stories surrounding the estimated 30,000 captive wild animals living outside the national zoo system often end in tragedy, for both man and animal. In 2003, government officials raided a California facility called Tiger Rescue that advertised itself as a refuge for animals retired from the entertainment industry. Officials found more than 100 dead animals—mostly tigers, including 58 dead tiger cubs in a freezer—and 100 other severely malnourished and dehydrated animal actors. Craig and his team rescued 23 of the tigers that made it out alive. That same year, a 10-year-old boy was mauled to death by his aunt’s 400-pound pet tiger.
“Unfortunately, laws prohibiting private ownership of exotic animals usually follow a tragedy,” Craig says, referring to a 2003 Kansas law that barred contact between dangerous animals and the public. That law, Haley’s Act, was passed after a high school girl was killed by a tiger while posing for her prom picture. The tiger licked her leg, she screamed, and the tiger instinctively attacked. “When people are posing next to a tiger, they usually don’t consider things like where that animal lives and what it eats,” Craig says. “Is it being cared for, or does it live in a cage in someone’s basement?”
Since he opened his sanctuary almost 27 years ago, Craig and his team of volunteers have rescued more than 800 exotic animals, including a mountain lion whose skull had been fractured with a baseball bat, a tiger and a black bear kept in an Evergreen basement, an African lion starving in a Denver garage, and two black bears so used to walking upright for a food reward that it took them a month to realize they could walk normally and still get fed. The team traveled to Mexico to rescue an African lion that was kept in a cement pit and given stray dogs to eat.
Craig remembers being uneasy when his father once killed a chicken on the family’s Boulder farm at 75th and Valmont, yet his real passion for helping animals began just after his graduation from Fairview High School. His father had died two years before, and Craig had taken over the farm.
“I visited a friend who was working as a groundskeeper at a South Carolina zoo, and he took me into the back, and that’s when I saw all the animals that nobody sees—tigers in small little cages you wouldn’t want to keep your dog in. It was a big culture shock, and I thought, This is where they live?” Greatly affected by what he’d seen, Craig decided to make some calls about the “surplus” animals. “I went back to running my farm but called the Colorado state government, asking ‘Shouldn’t we pass laws on this?’”
Scalera nods her head as if sharing the memory. A former Longmont resident, she got into animal activism back in the ’60s, protesting the clubbing of Canadian harp-seal pups.
Happier Endings
Craig decided to do something about the problem and converted his farm to accommodate some of the more difficult surplus animals from South Carolina. “The reason I started this sanctuary is because the big cats are the ones nobody else will take; they are dangerous and expensive to feed. It costs about $6,000 a week to feed 10 big cats,” he says. He began writing to zoos and received 300 responses in the first few weeks. A sick jaguar cub named Freckles became his first resident and lived to be 24.
The sanctuary soon outgrew the Boulder property, and Craig and his animals moved to a larger acreage in Lyons. But when a granitequarrying company moved in next door, the noise of trucks forced him to move again. He relocated near the village of Keenesburg, in Weld County, about 50 miles from Boulder. Because more and more animals need to be rescued, Craig anticipates yet another move unless he can acquire some adjacent property, though he doubts he can afford it. The annual cost of running the facility now stands at about $1.2 million, more than half of which goes for food.
“When we first moved out here, land was $500 per acre. Now it’s $3,500,” he says. He’s hoping someone will either donate the land or give enough money to buy it outright.
For the most part, the Wild Animal Sanctuary gets by on private donations from the general public, with the most generous cities per capita being Boulder, Evergreen and Longmont. In 2003, the sanctuary opened its doors to visitors to raise additional income and educate the public about the ongoing predicament exotic animals face. It’s not like a zoo experience, where people come up close to animals in cages. Instead, visitors walk up a centrally located, 35-foot-high observation platform with high-powered binoculars mounted in each corner, and can unobtrusively view the animals as they roam the surrounding grasslands.
Despite the revenue from tourist traffic, funds remain tight. One issue of which Craig and his staff are painfully aware when rescuing new animals is the long-term financial commitment involved. “Bears live up to 35 years in captivity, and most big cats to about 24,” Craig says. “And we take care of these animals for life.” Another problem, he explains, is that donations to animal causes usually take a nosedive after human disasters like the hurricanes and tsunami of 2005. The sanctuary almost shut down in 2006, but a surge in media attention has since increased both awareness and donations.
“I don’t know where all the animals would go if we closed,” says Craig, “because there are only a handful of big-cat sanctuaries and even fewer bear habitats.” Scalera quietly nods in agreement. The specter of euthanasia hangs in the air. “I remember a saying by Chief Seattle,” she says, “that if all the animals were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit.” No one wants that to happen. So Craig and his team struggle on, providing a place of refuge for our society’s mistreated wild animals.
The Wild Animal Sanctuary is open from 9am to 4pm daily except on major holidays and in bad weather. Admission costs $10 per adult and $5 per child. To get there from Boulder or Longmont: Take Diagonal Highway to Highway 52 East, cross I-76, go through Hudson, and continue about 4 miles. Turn right on Weld County Road 53 and go about 3 miles, following the signs into the sanctuary parking lot at 1946 Road 53, Keenesburg. 303-536-0118; www.wildanimal-sanctuary.org.
The Wild Animal Sanctuary welcomes visitors all year. Instead of seeing animals up close in cages, people mount a central platform to watch them roam the savannahlike 160-acre compound.
