http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080214.wjaguar14/BNStory/National/
Roadside zoo loses jaguar in latest blow
TIMOTHY APPLEBY
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
February 14, 2008 at 5:20 AM EST
Gone are the tigers at Guha's Tiger & Lion Farm, a modest roadside zoo near Bracebridge in Ontario's Muskoka region; they've all been shipped off for breeding. Also gone is the wolf that shared a cage with a tiger, sleeping in a refrigerator.
And now Bhino the black jaguar is gone as well, felled by an OPP bullet Tuesday after the animal escaped from its cage and began savaging the zoo owner's chained-up dog Blue, an Australian shepherd.
Blue, too, had to be shot, so severe were the dog's injuries. All of which has left proprietor Nanda Guha in great distress.
The dozens of roadside zoos that dot Ontario's rural highways and remain largely unregulated if they host non-Canadian wildlife have long been a sore point with animal-rights activists.
Mr. Guha, however, blames scavenging foxes for the loss of his beloved Bhino, who in happier times used to play with Blue and for years lived in Mr. Guha's house. "I was feeding him some raw meat and the foxes later swarmed on his cage and he must have been really upset with those foxes," he recounted. "Some of the food must have dropped out of my hand and a bunch of foxes came to eat that, and he must have been terribly upset about that because he made a little hole in the fence."
When the Ontario Provincial Police were summoned, "I wanted to stun him and put him in another cage, but there was no taser or tranquillizer gun. So the only choice we had was to shoot him, for the safety of the neighbours.
"This didn't happen because of anybody's fault, it happened because of the fault of nature. If those foxes hadn't been there, this wouldn't have happened."
Had Bhino been a bear, a deer, a wolf or any other indigenous animal in captivity, the animal would have enjoyed a measure of protection from the Ministry of Natural Resources. Foreign animals, however, almost entirely escape scrutiny.
In the runup to last October's provincial election, Dalton McGuinty's Liberals pledged to plug that gap, with a cruelty-to-animals legislative package that would transform Ontario's animal-welfare regulations from the weakest in Canada to the most stringent.
Melissa Tkachyk of the World Society for the Protection of Animals is hopeful that's what will take place after Queen's Park resumes business later this month. "Nothing has happened so far," she said yesterday.
Also keen to see tougher regulations is the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which in August gave Mr. Guha a warning - which he heeded - about his animals' living conditions. "But in this case, which involved containment rather than cruelty, there's nothing we can do," SPCA spokeswoman Kristin Williams said of Bhino.
New laws would be promulgated by the Ministry of Community and Public Safety. A ministry spokesman said they are on track but "we can't predict" when they might be tabled.
Bhino's demise is just the latest high-profile incident involving animals in captivity. San Francisco drew world attention on Christmas Day when a Siberian tiger leaped from its grotto and attacked three visitors, killing one, before being shot dead by police.
Mr. Guha said he was unaware of the impending legislation but was glad to learn of it. As for his own dwindling inventory - five lions, two cougars, a black panther and two alpacas (llama-like beasts of Andean extraction) - "I treat them like my own children."
Ms. Tkachyk, who visited the zoo last August, is unimpressed.
"The animals are kept in deplorable conditions, I'm not surprised that an animal escaped, that facility is very substandard," she said. "It's a problem zoo and a great example of why we need regulations in Ontario. The owner told us that some of his animals froze to death last winter."
Zoocheck Canada also monitors zoos and gave a similarly bleak appraisal when it visited Guha's a year earlier. (Among its observations was that Ontario Ministry of Transportation staff would routinely deliver free roadkill to the zoo; eventually, after many such deliveries, the sight of the ministry truck rolling into the driveway triggered great excitement among the animals.)
And, perhaps most bizarre, Guha's was in 2002 the scene of a kidnapping in which a young Bengal tiger named Sheba was spirited away by a lovesick former owner.
"They killed him," Mr. Guha said disconsolately of the tiger-nappers.