Texas, where wild things aren’t

For years, Kaufman County has cultivated a reputation as something of a haven for wild animals and their owners, a place where elephants, chimpanzees and cougars might be as at home as cattle, pigs and dogs.

Not anymore.

After a tiger mauled a handler and livestock were found dead and mangled, the county changed its historically relaxed approach to regulating exotic -- and some say dangerous -- animals by imposing a ban to prevent any more big cats or bears from making their home here.

By doing so, Kaufman joined the more than 70% of Texas counties that largely prohibit keeping wild animals as pets, making owning virtually all but a cat or dog illegal.

“I don’t want everyone else to see us as the last bastion of retreat for everyone who wants to start into this business,” Kaufman County Commissioner Jerry Rowden said. “I want everyone to be safe. I don’t want to have any injuries.”

The issue in Kaufman came as other Texas counties are defining how wild a wild animal they’re prepared to tolerate. In Kendall County, north of San Antonio, commissioners are debating whether to ban certain exotic birds or reptiles, pitting property rights against public health and safety concerns.

Under the new rules in Kaufman, a rural county of 89,000 residents, owners can keep existing pets but are subject to new local inspections and registrations. New exotic animal owners are banned entirely.

Among those who get to stay are Beth and Corey Junell, who have three servals -- small African cats that grow to about 40 pounds and are on the state’s list of dangerous wild animals. They feed the cats horsemeat, at $1 a pound, freshly processed from Dallas Crown Inc.

The Junells moved to Kaufman last year after they were in effect run out of nearby Combine, a town of 1,700. They lived there just three months before neighbors -- including a school -- complained and the city passed an ordinance banning servals.

“There was the thought of one of those cats being loose, jumping the fence and mauling one of those kids,” said former Combine City Councilman Mike Ellison. “A lot of people also have dogs in their yard. If one or two of those things got loose, there was a fear those cats would go picking them off.”

Servals, bobcats, baboons and 16 other animals are classified as a “dangerous wild animal” under a 2001 Texas law. Each locale decides how it deals with such animals, though most ban them. Some counties adopt the most liberal option and merely require that owners register their animals.

The law does not apply to zoos, research facilities and sanctuaries such as Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation in Kendalia. Lynn Cuny, the center’s executive director, said it was inhumane to keep wild animals in a backyard refuge and wanted all of Texas’ 254 counties to outlaw the practice.

“Texas is a huge state with a lot of private property and not a lot of federal land,” Cuny said. “There’s not much in the way of regulation or enforcement....It’s simply not morally right to be doing this to animals.”

Doug Terranova has dozens of exotic animals at his Kaufman County ranch, where elephants and camels are visible from the road in front of his property. The menagerie includes the University of Houston’s official cougar mascot; an elderly timberwolf that appeared in the “Walker, Texas Ranger” television series and a spider monkey.

Some of the 60 animals on the property are owned by others who live in nearby counties with bans. Terranova said no animals had escaped the ranch in the 17 years he had owned the operation.

The new rules in Kaufman passed by a 3-1 vote in late March, with the lone dissent coming from a commissioner who wanted to rid the county of all exotic animals. But Rowden said he wasn’t comfortable effectively evicting residents who had been in the county for several years, especially when there had been no major problems. Even a U.S. Department of Agriculture inspector determined that the escaped tiger probably didn’t kill the ranchers’ livestock last June.

The Junells have spent $9,000 on a double-layered cage in their front yard for their servals and thousands more on insurance. They’d like to offset the costs by breeding the servals with domestic house cats to produce savannahs, a fashionable exotic pet. The couple says one kitten can fetch upward of $5,000.

Watching the year-old serval he keeps inside his home, Corey Junell said he hoped to see his docile pet taken off the state’s list of dangerous wild animals.

“They won’t hurt you,” he said. “Our dogs are much more dangerous than they are.”

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Texas’ danger list

The list of “dangerous wild animals” defined under Texas law: baboon, bear, bobcat, caracal, cheetah, chimpanzee, cougar, coyote, gorilla, hyena, jackal, jaguar, leopard, lion, lynx, ocelot, orangutan, serval, tiger, or any hybrid of those animals.

Source: Associated Press