TAMPA, Fla. — In their years of animal welfare work, Carole and Howard Baskin of Tampa’s Big Cat Rescue found that most customers who paid to cuddle with tiger cubs at zoos never knew the misery they were creating.
Owners of pay-to-play businesses pulled cubs from their mothers after birth, forced them to interact with the public and often confined them to tiny concrete cages when they got too large to handle.
The breeding has been a leading driver of the overpopulation of captive big cats in the U.S. as animals who outgrew the photo stage were passed to roadside zoos, private homes and other hellish places.
