Texana
Unnatural Habitat
At Noah's Land, an exotic-animal park near Bastrop, the living conditions of some of the inhabitants are downright beastly.
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When Rick and Cheri took over the management of the nine-year-old park in 1998, it had a checkered past. In 1995 founder and owner Richard Burns, a Houston-area businessman who was then running the park, was cited for fourteen violations of the Animal Welfare Act. Two years later he auctioned off many of the animals. When Burns needed a new manager in 1998, the Watsons applied for the job, even though they had no experience running an exotic-animal facility. "We thought, 'Oooh, pick us!'" Rick says. They took charge of the business, leasing the property from Burns and keeping the revenues the park produced, and moved themselves and their three children into a house on the 275 acres. Forty-six-year-old Rick, a friendly and talkative man with owlish glasses and hair worn in a short ponytail, kept his position as director of continuous improvement with the Austin office of defense contractor BAE Systems (formerly Marconi, which merged with British Aerospace). Cheri, 49—with straight blond hair and an assessing gaze—ran the park day to day and also kept up her work as a volunteer wildlife rehabilitator specializing in deer, for which she is licensed by Texas Parks and Wildlife. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Noah's Land became the Watsons' life.
Over time, they developed a vision for the park that involved replacing all the small, inadequate cages up front and constructing a huge, $2 million tiger compound with ponds and a slide for up to one hundred of the water-loving cats. In an e-mail to a Noah's Land board member, Rick waxed enthusiastic, "Can you see Tijar and especially Midas going down a water slide in front of customers!!!" There was just one problem: no money. The park, located on an obscure farm-to-market road, didn't come close to breaking even. A big day was 25 or 30 cars. "Many times I would come home from work and empty my wallet to pay the employees and buy feed," says Rick. Rent from the RV park that occupies part of the property helped only a little. With expenses averaging $130,000 a year, Rick and Cheri decided in mid-1998 to convert to nonprofit status for the tax advantages. They became the corporation's executive directors; Rick became chairman of the board.
The scarcity of money and workers initiated a cascade of compromises, beginning with food. Zoos typically feed their big cats a commercial diet composed of horsemeat and beef laced with vitamins and minerals. From the beginning, Noah's Land relied mainly on turkey carcasses donated by area poultry farms and occasional free beef from ranches and cattle auction barns. The only problem was that over-reliance on poultry can result in a serious calcium and phosphorus deficiency in big cats called metabolic bone disease—causing weak, easily broken bones, cataracts, and other ailments. The Animal Welfare Act specifies that food fed to animals must be wholesome and appropriate. In July the USDA informed Noah's Land that the cats' diet needed to be approved by a vet; it remained unapproved as of the November report.
Cleanliness was also a constant problem, not just in the large tiger compounds outside but in the kitchen where the animals' food was prepared. Says Lynne Leone, an employee who became a board member: "Many times I washed roaches out of the baby tigers' formula." Former board member Rosemary Nisi of Dallas started out as an enthusiastic volunteer worker, raising $21,500 for the park, but she gradually became frustrated with what she saw going on. "Often the nipples for the baby bottles would be full of mold," she says. "I used to bring Scrub and Bubbles, a disinfectant, and clean the nipples and the bottles really good." Rick Watson denies this, saying that the nipples were kept clean.
Veterinary care was another problem repeatedly cited in the USDA reports. On four separate visits over a year, inspectors noted specific animals that were injured or sick and obviously should have been seen by a vet. Five animals that were written up as needing care on September 14 still had not received it when the inspector showed up again almost a month later. Sometimes minor medical care was rendered on-site by Cheri, but in a way that flew in the face of sanitary procedures. "When we would do IV's—to introduce fluids if an animal was ill—often we would not use sterile needles out of a box; we would use one that might have been hanging there for a week and that had been used on another animal," says Leone. "That happened the whole time I was there." Rick maintains that they used clean needles and discarded them afterward.
Even though the staff was hard-pressed to keep up with the animals they already had, Rick and Cheri were loath to neuter any of the tigers. Rick said in July that he didn't like the idea of "shutting down their life cycle." (Under pressure from the USDA and helped by an anonymous October donation earmarked for neutering, they have now changed their position.) Thanks largely to the births, the tiger population peaked last summer at 43—far more than any zoo in the country and the second-largest population of any private facility in Texas, after Bridgeport Nature Center near Fort Worth. (Today Noah's Land has 35 tigers, several having been moved elsewhere.) To explain away the tiger boom, visitors were told that the USDA had asked Noah's Land to take in tigers, including pregnant females, as a humanitarian gesture. In fact, the USDA never recommended that any tigers be placed there; it only monitored the transfer of the animals, and none were pregnant.
The late summer and fall of 2000 was not a good time for Noah's Land. Temperatures and emotions flared, particularly after Rosemary Nisi and her friend Carol Casey (an advisory board member) began to agitate for Rick and Cheri to stop the breeding and to let them move the seven baby tigers to the sanctuary in Wylie (an eighth tiger was also eventually moved). A month after they finally persuaded the Watsons, Nisi resigned from the board of directors. Shortly thereafter, Rick dissolved the advisory board (a separate body). In mid-October, board member Lynne Leone also resigned. In explaining their decisions, Nisi and Leone cited their frustration with many things they had seen at the animal park. The Watsons, for their part, felt that they had been abandoned by their former allies and fundraisers. Rick also accused them of stirring up the USDA and orchestrating a "hate campaign" of negative comments that showed up on the Noah's Land Web site. The final blow came when the USDA informed Rick and Cheri that the park was under formal investigation. The process—which involves taking sworn testimony and examining records—was expected to take several months. If it results in legal action by the agency, the penalties could range from a warning to a fine to suspension of the park's license. But as USDA investigator Jackie Freeman says, the agency doesn't try to shut places down: "We would rather bring them into compliance." Besides, where would 35 tigers go? Mainstream zoos don't want so-called generic tigers like those at Noah's Land, whose species integrity is not documented, and sanctuaries have only so much space.
If there is one lesson to be drawn from Noah's Land, it is that wild animal parks and sanctuaries in Texas need considerably more scrutiny than they are getting. The current best hope for improvement at the state level lies in the Dangerous Wild Animal Act, a bill that will be introduced in the Legislature this session by state representative Toby Goodman of Arlington. The best part of the bill, as far as the animals are concerned, is its provision for improved caging standards. It would also authorize local animal-control officials to inspect the living conditions of privately owned exotics. Otherwise, it is almost identical to the federal Animal Welfare Act. Although the person who crafted the bill's language, Dallas attorney Robert L. "Skip" Trimble, concedes that it has been watered down as a compromise measure, he still expects opposition from the Exotic Wildlife Association, the lobbying group for hunting ranches, and from individuals who believe they have a God-given right to own exotic animals. But while not perfect, the bill would at least provide another level of oversight and the possible deterrent of fines.
And so Noah's Land moves into its third year under the present regime with a question mark hanging over its future. Surprise inspections have been occurring almost monthly, but as the USDA's Freeman notes, closing the park would be unusual. Maybe the federal agency's get-tough attitude—coupled with the influx of money and fresh, undisillusioned volunteers brought in by the TV appeals—will usher in a new era for the troubled wildlife park. For the animals' sake, one can only hope.
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