Clashing Views of Owner of Tiger Sanctuary Emerge

At the Tiger Rescue sanctuary in Colton, John Weinhart was known as Tarzan, a man with a mystical connection to the big cats he boasted of saving from circuses, films and television productions.

When he walked into a pen of leopards, the animals would fight over who got to rub against him, recalled Marlon Hilbert, an employee of the exotic cat sanctuary that Weinhart has run for the last 30 years.

“I live with them,” Weinhart told a newspaper reporter in 2000. “The pores of my skin smell like a tiger. So when I go around one I don’t know they accept me as a tiger.”

But the image of John Weinhart as the benevolent rescuer gave way to a far different portrait this week when officials raided his Riverside County home and discovered 90 dead tigers, including 58 cubs found in freezers. The raid came months after prosecutors charged Weinhart with a variety of violations at the shelter, including breeding animals without a permit, failure to clean animal cages and supplying animals with insufficient food and water. Weinhart pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to face trial in late May.

Carl LeBlanc, a San Bernardino County deputy district attorney, said Thursday that he will ask the judge to close Tiger Rescue to the public and take the animals away from Weinhart. LeBlanc said he believes Weinhart was breeding tiger cubs without proper permits but he doesn’t know why. Weinhart’s permit at the Colton sanctuary allows him to keep and exhibit tigers but bars him from breeding them, he said.

“I am convinced he’s breeding them, but I am not convinced he’s selling them,” LeBlanc said.

At the same time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed that it is investigating Weinhart for possible violations of animal cruelty laws. State Department of Fish and Game officials said they had received complaints about conditions at Tiger Rescue dating to the mid-1970s, and have cited the facility several times for “small problems” such as inadequate caging of animals and lack of water, said fish and game assistant chief Mike McBride.

Weinhart remained secluded in his home Thursday, sending word that he would speak to the media Saturday.

Those who work with him staunchly defend Weinhart as a benevolent rescuer.

“I’ve seen him with $100 in his pocket,” said Steve Jeffries, a spokesman for Tiger Rescue. “He’ll spend $95 on cat food and then go to Burger King for $5 of food for himself. That’s his life.... He gets along better with animals than people.”

Others who know him speak less of an animal lover and more of a profiteer masquerading as a rescuer.

This incident is “a horrible example of something that occurs every day in this country,” said Pat Derby, who runs the Performing Animal Welfare Society outside of Galt.

From all accounts, Weinhart has been involved with animals -- particularly tigers -- for the last 30 years. According to one acquaintance, Jan Giacinto of Tarzana, he started with a pet shop in Inglewood in the 1960s.

In the 1970s in the Los Angeles area, when Pat Derby met Weinhart, “he and his wife did a sort of circus act and a nightclub act, and they played all over,” Derby said. She recalls a charming, attractive, well-muscled man who kissed his tigers in the act and put them through their paces of rising on their hind legs and other tricks.

Working Animals

Weinhart worked circuses and shopping malls, put his animals in movies and tried to break into Las Vegas, according to Derby, who was an animal trainer.

Derby said Weinhart kept his animals in a warehouse with outdoor runs in an industrial area outside Los Angeles. Eventually, the acts gave way to selling animals, she said.

“He was a very well-known animal breeder and dealer in the ‘70s and ‘80s -- leopards and Sumatran tigers,” she said.

Giacinto, 78, an animal trainer and owner, remembers that Weinhart would spend months at a time in Las Vegas. He would frequently rent his cats to magic acts playing in the city. He would also set up a booth and charge tourists to have their photos taken with the big cats, she said.

“He was trying to do whatever he could do to work with the animals and rent them out,” she said.

Friends said he moved to the Inland Empire and started Tiger Rescue in the mid-1970s.

Weinhart told the Orange County Register in a 1999 interview that he decided to save tigers after seeing stacks of their skulls while serving in the Vietnam War.

For years, Tiger Rescue was based at his home in Glen Avon. But in 1998, he was forced to move the facility because of a zoning change by Riverside County that prohibited him from keeping exotic cats in the neighborhood.

Tiger Rescue found a home in nearby Colton, on the site of a former sewage treatment plant. The city of Colton leased him the land for seven years at $115 a month.

The grounds became a popular weekend destination for local residents, who for $20 could have their photos taken holding a tiger cub.

He was portrayed in the local press and in his own literature as a devoted caretaker, lovingly hand-rearing newborn tiger cubs and, he said, providing 1,000 pounds a day of chicken and beef to their collection of tigers.

Some Were Appalled

But some experts who visited Tiger Rescue came away appalled by what they saw.

Natalie Paulson, now director of animal welfare at a sanctuary in Los Angeles County, was so shocked by what she saw in August when she visited that she called the USDA to complain.

“It was horrendous,” Paulson said. “All the animals were malnourished -- no water, no shelter from the elements or shade; there was an African lion fully grown that was in a box with no water or shelter.... Everything was so dirty. Some of the tigers were infested with fleas.”

When she approached Weinhart to ask why the animals had no water, she recalls, “He said, ‘Oh, they keep tipping the water bottles out.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you tie the bottles to the chain-link fencing?’ He said, ‘I have the wrong gauge chain link and they’ll pull on the bottle and pull the chain link out.’ ”

Equally disturbing to Paulson was the presence of tiger cubs, which the sanctuary seemed to have a lot of.

In November, the state Department of Fish and Game raided the Colton facility. Officials said they found filthy conditions and animals lacking enough food and water.

The Tuesday raid at Weinhart’s home came after investigators received a tip that a tiger cub might be living there. Authorities said that, in addition to the dead tigers, they also found malnourished animals roaming around the compound. Weinhart, 60, and his companion, Marla Smith, were charged with one count of child endangerment because their 8-year-old son lived among the animals.

Wendelin Rae Ringel Moore, a veterinarian licensed in California who worked for Weinhart, also was arrested and charged with animal cruelty. Riverside County prosecutors said they are reviewing the evidence and might file additional charges.

Jeffries, Weinhart’s spokesman, disputed the number of dead tigers officials said they found outside the home. He said the figure was much lower. As for the cubs in the freezer, Jeffries said they might have been used for research. He said he didn’t where they came from.

Hilbert, another Tiger Rescue employee, said the dead baby tigers may have been stillborn and born from cats that Weinhart had taken into the facility without realizing they were pregnant.

“He loves these animals and they love him,” Hilbert said.

Regulators “don’t see him walking into a pen and see the leopards fighting over who can rub his leg first. John’s not a killer. I can’t even see him putting an animal out of its misery.”