Big Cat Lover Has Big Dream for Big Park

It’s hard to carry on a civilized conversation when your pet lion is grubbing for attention.

And boy, does Wayne Ragen’s lion want attention.

Ragen is sitting at his kitchen table, trying to discuss his dream of a wild animal park like none ever seen, and the lion cub is raising a ruckus from the porch: growling, grumbling and hurling his body against the sliding-glass door.

He doesn’t shut up until Ragen comes out to scratch his tawny belly.

But the interruption is appropriate. For Ragen’s vision of a new concept in animal parks was sparked by this lion cub on the porch--and by the six lionesses and five tigers snoozing in the backyard.

Ragen, a former circus tamer, raises these cats like his children, burning through $30,000-a-year beef bills and attracting an odd look now and again when he takes his tigers for exercise strolls in this blistered desert town east of Indio.

He can’t really explain why he does it, except to say that big cats “have been a passion since I was a little kid.” Shrugging, he grins: “I’m just goofy about them.”

To pay for his unusual pets--who each eat the equivalent of 20 to 60 Quarter Pounders a day--Ragen has had to turn them into performers. He’s put his head in their jaws under circus tents. He’s ordered them to stand on hind legs for foreign tours. Most recently, he’s carted them off on an educational circuit of schools.

But after 22 years in show business, he wants more.

He’s tired of caging the animals he refers to, with pride, as “my girls.” He’s tired, too, of displaying them in canned routines, the jumps through hoops at the cue of a whip-cracking trainer.

Ragen wants to show audiences the true majesty of the big cats: how they bound after zebras and prowl in prides, how they protect their young and fight for dominance.

Most important, he wants researchers to study his girls and other big cats to determine whether they retain the instincts needed for survival in the wild after generations of captivity.

To further these goals, Ragen has come up with a scheme he calls Wildlife Ambassadors. It’s just a dream now--just a color drawing on a big piece of cardboard. Yet it’s taken hold of his life. From his isolated ranch in this tiny town famous only as the birthplace of the date milkshake, Ragen has spent the last year eagerly seeking investment.

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He’s trying to find backers to create a 1,300-acre wild animal park in Northern California. This park of his would, he says, be a “quantum leap” above traditional zoos, because it would re-create African and Asian ecosystems--and stock them with a complete food chain of both predators and prey.

In his vision, researchers and tourists would observe the park, but not interfere. If a tiger was too weak to hunt, it would starve. If a lion was maimed in battle, it would bleed. If an elephant rejected her baby, so be it.

“It would be like what you see on the Discovery Channel, not what you see in the zoo,” said Ragen’s partner, Katherine Guest. “I think it’s beautiful. But it’s not like ‘The Lion King.’ ”

It’s also not even close to becoming a reality. Ragen has yet to raise the $20,000 he needs for an initial feasibility study of the park.

So for now, at least, he’ll stay in Thermal, maxing out his credit cards just to pay for his girls’ dinners.

Thermal is a live-and-let-live kind of town; people here pretty much do their own thing. And Ragen’s 20-acre ranch is isolated enough that his girls can roar the night away without drawing a complaint. So he’s in no hurry to move.

Indeed, if Ragen ever achieves his dream of building the park, the transition will be wrenching.

This is a man who coos at his animals in the most gooey baby talk. A man who let Tsavo, the fuzz-ball lion cub, sleep in his bed for weeks. Yet if his park dream succeeds, he will have to give up hands-on work with lions and tigers--work that has defined his life since he dropped out of college for a job at Marine World Africa USA.

Though he swallows hard while saying it, Ragen, 41, insists that the sacrifice would be worthwhile.

“It’s like a parent letting kids go off and live their own lives. You’ve got to let go sooner or later,” he said. “I have scraped and scrimped and borrowed over the years so I would not lose my animals. But I would give up my ability to hug any one of them if I could see them living in a pride.”

Right now, Ragen’s animals have no chance to form a pride. Instead, they sleep away most days in their 300-square-foot cages, on a ranch buffered by acres of date palms and forlorn chaparral.

The federal and state governments regulate exotic animals, so Ragen submits his compound to several inspections each year. As cages go, his are fairly plush: Each cat has deep pools of water to dunk in, wooden crates to play on and automatic bug spray spritzers to chase off flies.

For all the love he lavishes on them, Ragen never forgets that his girls are wild. Just the other day, he was mock-wrestling with a lioness named Toscha when another, Timba, pounced on him from behind and grabbed his leg with her massive paws. He got out of it by keeping the mood playful. But if he had tensed up, he said, Timba would have let him have it.

“All that training and all that bonding wouldn’t mean anything. . . . I would have turned into easy prey,” he said. “If you make a mistake and get out of it with just a scar, you’ve been lucky.”

Although he knows better than to turn his back on them, Ragen worries that his girls lack the true killer instincts they would need to survive in the wild.

As cubs, they showed no inclination to tear into Ragen’s domesticated pets; in fact, they let Kiba the Akita massage their rumps and they tumbled playfully with Rover the cat. They whacked a watermelon to bits in minutes when Ragen tossed it in their compound as a toy. But they seem on the verge of purring when Ragen scratches behind their ears.

“If we let these guys out in the wild, they don’t have the instincts they need because they’ve been in captivity for so long,” said Suzie Kirby, curator of the American Wilderness Experience, a new zoo opening soon in Ontario. Projects such as Ragen’s proposed park, she said, would help address that concern.

However, three prominent biologists who work with endangered species questioned the feasibility of the project.

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Ragen’s goal of reintroducing captive cats to the wild is romantic but naive, they said. There’s no point in letting zoo-bred lions and tigers go free because they have no place to go--their natural habitats are shrinking, done in by development and poaching.

“It would make very little sense to reintroduce these animals [to the wild] at this time,” said Benjamin Beck, who chairs the American Zoo and Aquarium Assn.’s reintroductory advisory group.

Quite aside from this scientific concern, conservation biologist Kathy Traylor-Holzer predicted that “a lot of people would have huge ethical problems with putting live prey in an enclosed area with predators.”

Still, Ragen is plunging ahead with his dream. He recently abandoned the 15 shows a year that provided his main source of income so he could focus all his energy on fund-raising.

He’s already picked out a location: 1,300 acres for sale near Clear Lake, a two-hour drive north from San Francisco. He has set up a nonprofit to handle finances. And he has won a hearty endorsement from the chairman of the Lake County economic development team. He even has a letter from Hilton expressing interest in building a hotel near the park.

Now all he needs is $2 million to buy the land--and $200 million to develop the park.

As he tries to raise money from private investors, Ragen knows his girls are his biggest asset.

They blow bubbles in their pools, lick him through their chain-link cages and bound around making snorty “chuff chuff” sounds at one another. People tend to melt, Ragen said, as soon as they see them.

“I can lecture an audience for 30 minutes on the lifestyle of the lion and the tiger, but it’s when I show them that I build appreciation of these animals,” he said. “These animals are my ambassadors.”