The Allure of Exotic Animals in Strange Places - The New Yorker

Nova is a four-year-old clouded leopard with round ears and a dappled coat. In January, when she went missing from her enclosure at the Dallas Zoo, officials reassured the public that she was unlikely to be a danger to anything bigger than a squirrel. “Thinking like a cat, she likely went straight up to the trees and has not come down,” Harrison Edell, an executive vice-president at the zoo, said at a press conference. Nova was found later that day, after an agitated squirrel alerted zookeepers to her presence. She had apparently escaped through a cut in her enclosure. The next day, zoo staff discovered a similar cut in the wire mesh surrounding an exhibit of spectacled langur monkeys, an endangered, leaf-eating species native to Southeast Asia. The monkeys hadn’t escaped, but zoo officials worried that the worst was still to come.

Those suspicions were justified. According to the account that a man named Davion Irvin later gave to police, he waited until dark on the evening of January 29th, jumped a fence, sliced through the enclosure surrounding an exhibit of emperor tamarin monkeys, and made off with two of the tiny one-pound creatures. He took them with him on the light rail to a vacant house, where he kept a collection of cats and pigeons. Police arrested him four days later, near the Dallas World Aquarium, where he’d been seen asking questions about octopuses and sharks. Irvin has been charged with six counts of animal cruelty and two counts of burglary.

With a long coastline and an international border, Texas is a hotbed of wildlife trafficking. “It’s all driven by money. At the end of the day, there’s a commodity that somebody wants somewhere,” Brent Satsky, a major in the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, told me. In his special-operations work in the department, Satsky said, he has seen many species trafficked. “All kinds of reptiles—I mean, like reticulated pythons, Burmese pythons, alligators, snapping turtles,” he said. “Any kind of tortoise. The red-eared sliders, which are native to Texas—there’s people all over the globe, apparently, that want those. We had a king cobra in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. John Q. Public just shouldn’t have a cobra. It’s not a good idea.”

But Irvin’s motivations seemed more psychological than financial. He told police that he loved animals, and that if he were released he would take more of them. Irvin is not the first person to covet, and then steal, a zoo animal. In 2020, after Cory McGilloway abducted a ring-tailed lemur named Maki from the San Francisco Zoo, he searched “foods to feed lemurs,” “lemurs eat chocolate,” “veterinary care for lemurs,” and “names for monkey.” McGilloway was jailed for nearly eighteen months before pleading guilty to a misdemeanor; Maki became a “symbol of resilience and bravery” and a “fan favorite,” zoo officials said, before he died, of old age and kidney disease, last spring.

Texas’s laws governing exotic-animal ownership are notably permissive. Although most Texans live in urban areas, inhabitants’ self-conception is still bound up with ideas of the frontier. Perhaps for this reason, or because of a general appetite for the outsized and absurd, or just because they can, many Texans have decided to live alongside all sorts of non-native species. McGilloway would not have been permitted to keep a lemur as a pet in California, but in Texas he could have kept one—or a monkey, or, with the right permit, a cobra. The state is home to enough privately owned (and poorly secured) big cats that Texas Monthly once ran a column with the title “A Brief History of Tigers on the Loose in Texas, 2021 Edition,” which detailed numerous cases of escaped, seized, and rescued pet tigers in the first five months of that year alone. Recently, there’s been a spate of escaped pet kangaroos.

Arguably, the most prominent (and lucrative) non-native species in the state are the ones living on Texas ranches. The practice started nearly a century ago, on the King Ranch, an enormous property so iconic that Ford named a premium version of its S.U.V.s and pickup trucks for it. In 1930, the San Diego Zoo supplied the ranch with a herd of nilgai, long-necked antelopes native to India and Pakistan. The semitropical climate suited them, and, absent natural predators, the population boomed. The King Ranch eventually began attracting hunters in search of exotic trophies. In the past few decades, as drought and rising temperatures have made cattle ranching less feasible in parts of the state, thousands of landowners have stocked their ranches with antelope, sheep, and goat species native to Africa and Asia. Hunting native animals, such as white-tailed deer, is restricted to certain months, but no law limits when you can shoot, say, an impala or a Cape buffalo—that way, hunting operations can run year-round.

According to the Texas-based Exotic Wildlife Association, this industry contributes a billion dollars to the state’s economy, and Texas’s exotic-hunting ranches have increasingly positioned themselves as conservationists who are also capitalists. WildLife Partners, an exotic-species breeder and broker, touts the animals as an investment whose growth “continues to out produce many traditional investment vehicles such as stocks, bonds and mutual funds.” And because hunters will pay a premium to bag a rare species—tens of thousands of dollars, in some cases—ranchers are incentivized to cultivate animals that are, in their native habitats, endangered by poaching and habitat loss. Certain species, such as the addax and the mountain bongo, both critically endangered, are more plentiful in Texas than in Africa; the scimitar-horned oryx was declared extinct in the wild a couple of decades ago, but there are thousands of them living in the Texas Hill Country.

The desire to construct a reality and call it nature—the conviction that the best way to save something is to monetize it—strikes me as very Texan. Of course, the assets don’t always perform as expected; the animals jump fences and go where they will. Consider the aoudad, a shaggy horned sheep native to North Africa, which was brought to Texas as exotic game in the nineteen-fifties. Some of them managed to escape into the wild, where they multiplied so vigorously that they now travel in herds of a few hundred, taking resources from native species. In the western part of the state, Texas Parks and Wildlife officials sometimes “harvest” aoudads—that is, shoot at them from helicopters—in an attempt, so far limited in its success, to keep their numbers in check.

The exotic species of Texas are co-opted into so many roles—as symbols, as resources, as trophies, as pets—that it can be easy to forget that they are, at the end of the day, animals. Once, driving back roads near the New Mexico border, I startled a hoofed creature with a blunt face and tall horns—an oryx, I think. It loped away with an odd head-bobbing gait, looking so thoroughly out of place that I briefly wondered if I had slipped through a wormhole and found myself on the savanna. It felt wrong, and also glorious, that we had both ended up in the same place at the same moment, two improbable Texans, making our way in a strange world.♦

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