New York City Has It All--Including a Variety of Wild, Exotic Animals

Not all the animals running loose in New York City are dogs, cats or freewheeling cab drivers. It is a jungle out there.

“I don’t expect to see a zebra, but then again this is Fun City, so you’ll never know,” said George S. Watford, head of rescue services for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

In 28 years with the humane society, Watford has seen alligators, baboons, bears, barn owls, caimans, chimpanzees and eagles. Foxes, horses, lambs, lions, mandrills and monitor lizards. Parrots, peregrine falcons, pigs, raccoons, sea turtles and sheep. Swans, tarantulas and tigers.

They all make their way to special SPCA preserves such as the room marked “EXOTIC ANIMALS” at the Manhattan shelter. There, amid the din of baying dogs and mewling cats, one can occasionally hear a hiss, screech or roar more common to the wilds of the Amazon or deepest Africa.

Last year, officials say, the organization captured 5,304 exotic animals--a category that includes everything but dogs and cats. But it takes something special to turn the head of an SPCA veteran.

“People consider bats exotic,” Watford said. “We don’t. We get a lot of them flying through New York City.”

The Manhattan shelter had three quail in its exotic ward one recent day; they had been seized at a pet store because selling the birds is illegal. Two weeks earlier, the Brooklyn shelter confiscated a ram from a Moslem family planning to slaughter it for a feast.

In December, a South American cargo ship 400 miles offshore radioed that an osprey had crash-landed on its deck. Once the vessel was in the harbor, a shelter worker was dispatched in a motor launch to retrieve the fish-eating hawk, now on the endangered species list.

In the Greatest Hits category, nothing tops the Burmese python that police discovered protecting a Queens drug dealer’s apartment.

“I’ve never seen anything that large, anything that weighed more than me in the snake area. And I weigh 200 pounds,” Watford said. The python was estimated to weigh 300 to 350 pounds. It measured 16 feet long and at least 30 inches around the head. In the exotic animal room, the snake stood straight up on its tail and sniffed the ceiling.

Police told Watford that the diet of the “guard snake” had been full-grown rabbits, six at a time.

“If it got around your neck, God knows what would happen,” he said. “It was certainly capable of swallowing a 12-year-old kid whole.”

Watford does not always know how the animals come to New York. “How does a sea turtle end up in a bathroom in upper Manhattan?” he said with a shrug. But he does know how they come to the attention of the SPCA.

They run amok.

Dramatic Example

Take snakes. “(Owners) wake up one morning and it’s not where it’s supposed to be. It’s not in the glass aquarium. Maybe the neighbor finds it in her bathtub. Or under her bed. Or in her bed. That creates the kind of environment that is quite frightening.”

Sometimes, the animals are involved in crimes. Richard A. Orzo, a 32-year veteran of the rescue service, remembers a monkey trained to perform specialized burglaries. The owner would cut circular holes in the windows of Brooklyn liquor stores and send the monkey in for cocktails.

Sometimes, the animals kill. Two years ago, a Queens woman was found dead in her home near aquariums full of venomous cobras.

“They’re fascinating. They’re beautiful,” Watford said. “People fall in love with snakes, even the most venomous type. . . . Just a nick and it could kill you.”

Often, it is not humans but the animals that are imperiled. Scores of barnyard animals have been confiscated before they could be sacrificed in religious ceremonies.

“We take a dim view of the killing of any animal,” Watford said.

Once captured, the animals are given to zoos, sent to animal farms or, when possible, released into the wild. They are not returned to their owners; keeping exotic animals is against New York City health codes.

The owners, who sometimes have invested thousands of dollars, do not always relinquish the beasts gracefully.

Police took custody of an ocelot after the cat--normally found in forests--ripped open both arms of its mistress, a Bronx woman. Her arms were placed in casts, and her cat was placed with the SPCA.

When she came to visit, shelter workers left her briefly alone with her pet and she was next seen trying to spirit the ocelot out the door, cradling it in her casts.