‘The Lion Queen’ Steps In When Lions, Tigers and Bears Outgrow Their Welcome

Watching Kathi Travers wrestling motherishly with an unruly lion cub in a Manhattan animal shelter, the boundaries between the species become startlingly blurry.

The lion may be the king of the jungle, but Travers, rescuing 3-month-old Xhosa from euthanasia or a life of cramped captivity, is once again proving she deserves to be the queen.

For 11 years, Travers has been rescuing lions and tigers and bears--and monkeys and cougars and armadillos and reptiles--from life-threatening situations and finding them homes.

“You’ve got to be a little wacky to do this, as you can see,” Travers acknowledged as she struggled with bruised, scratched-up arms to persuade a cantankerous Xhosa (KOH-suh) to get back into the cat carrier.

Even animal lovers who coo to their cats or walk their dogs in pouring rain at 4 a.m. would consider her an animal zealot.

She left her husband of 20 years to pursue her devotion to all things furry. She can’t sleep if she knows an animal is suffering.

She recently spent a week in New York, toting the lion cub everywhere she went, from taxis to bathrooms to restaurants, in a black canvas sherpa bag.

Travers’ title is “special director of animal affairs, exotic animals and animal transportation” for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, but a catchier one is “the Lion Queen.”

People who buy wild animals at exotic pet stores or through an animal-trafficking network only to become overwhelmed by the creatures’ fierceness call upon Travers to rescue them. Cash-strapped zoos unable to provide adequate care also have found a friend in her.

She eats, sleeps and breathes wild animals, even though they have left scars all over her body. Xhosa was the latest of hundreds she has rescued.

Travers, who is in her “mid-40s,” took Xhosa on the New York interview circuit to make the point that wild animals belong in the wild and should not be stolen from their mothers to become humans’ playthings.

“This is total disrespect for those that we share the planet with,” she declared, scratching the snarling cub’s stomach and jerking her hand away with lightning speed when 14-pound Xhosa swung a sharp-clawed, meaty paw.

“You cannot assume that when you get tired of playing, your local zoo is going to take it,” she said. Many such animals end up dead or caged in some roadside zoo.

Travers cooed at her 3-month-old charge, who emitted a guttural growl in response.

“This little girl should be raised by her mother and not by me,” she said.

Xhosa was an adorable golden fur ball when she was purchased by a man looking for a novelty pet at an exotic pet store in Cleveland. When she was 5 weeks old, he passed her off to his orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Tim Nice.

Nice, who owns 30,000 acres in Zimbabwe, was hoping to send Xhosa to a preserve in Africa, but he found it wasn’t feasible.

“In most cases, in the wild she’d be an hors d’oeuvre” because she doesn’t know how to protect herself, Travers said.

Zoos and animal experts recommended that Nice put the cub to sleep, but his 11-year-old daughter, Ashley, objected.

So Xhosa moved into Nice’s home--already filled with two adults, two children, three dogs and two guinea pigs--for a few months. Nice built her a pen, but Xhosa preferred to run loose in the house.

The cub needed three bottles of fortified baby formula every four hours. Nice knew that in a year, she would grow to full size, weighing as much as 400 pounds, and would eat 11 pounds of meat a day. So while he allowed the cub to sleep on his daughter’s bed, he never forgot her nature.

“This little cat would purr, rub against you or lick you,” he said. “But when it put its ears back, it would turn on you, and it would clamp down and put puncture marks in your arm.”

By the end, he said, “I couldn’t wait till this cat got out of the house.”

Enter Kathi Travers.

“When she walked in the door, that cat went right for her, fell in love with her,” Nice said. “She left the house with this cat zipped in the bag and fast asleep.”

Xhosa, after being examined by a veterinarian in New York, is on her way to Shambala, a 60-acre animal preserve in Acton, Calif., established by actress Tippi Hedren. She’ll be joined by a male lion that Travers plans to fetch soon.

Other animals Travers has taken to Hedren include a lion found tied in an auto transmission shop in Yonkers and a serval, an African cat with long pointed ears, that was discarded in a divorce battle.

Travers has five more lions she needs to place.

“And I have bears. If you need bears, call me,” she said. “I also have lots of monkeys.”

She also has plenty of human admirers.

“She won’t take no for an answer,” raved Jim Doherty, general curator of the Bronx Zoo.

“This lady should be nominated for sainthood, as far as animals are concerned,” said Gus Whitcomb, former director of American Airlines’ corporate communications.

Whitcomb helped Travers with the escapade of which she is most proud: rescuing three lions from euthanasia at the cash-strapped San Juan de Aragon Zoo in Mexico City.

An animal sanctuary in Boyd, Texas, agreed to take the lions. A year ago, American flew Travers, along with 12 boxes of medical supplies as a goodwill gift to the zoo, to Mexico City to check on the lions’ health. She found them living in 9- by 6-foot, concrete-walled cages.

“That day I made a promise to a guy named Rocky,” Travers said, referring to one of the three lions. “I promised him that I would come get him out of that zoo.”

It took until November, with Travers working with officials of Mexico, Texas, the sanctuary and the airline, which was flying the Los Angeles resident to Mexico City once a month to check on the lions.

To accommodate the lions, American took a wide-body plane from another route and put it on the smaller Mexican route for a day. But the day the jet arrived, Whitcomb says, Mexico’s government was going through a transition, and Travers got mired in paperwork.

At departure time, the lions weren’t on the plane yet, so the pilot told the passengers the story.

“The passengers refused to leave till they had the lions on board,” Whitcomb said.

A half-hour later, the plane departed, just as the tranquilizers given to the animals before they were loaded into crates began wearing off.

“The ultimate high of my life has been when that plane took off out of Mexico, to hear the three lions down below roaring,” Travers said.

Travers describes herself as a tough Irish gal, but when she talks about the chimp she befriended that died during a routine veterinary procedure, her eyes fill with tears.

“I know that I’m not superwoman and I can’t save them all,” she concedes, eyes glistening. “But I try my darnedest. That’s what makes me get up every day.”