Tiger Haven's 65 big cats were rescued from zoos, abuse, and exploitation. But legal battles could mean their nine lives are running out.
by Jesse
Fox Mayshark
They come to the fence when you approach, not quick or fierce, but curious. If they see a face they know, they start up a throaty engine noise called "chuffing" and rub their faces against the chain-link.
It's something to see them so close, all fur and whiskers and clear green eyes. From just a foot or two away, a tiger's stare is like a child's, equal parts inquiry, amusement, and caution. But the caution is advisedly reciprocal, as a sign on the fence makes clear: "Please do not feed fingers to the animals."
Joe Parker has no such fears on this mild March afternoon, reaching through the mesh to scratch the orange, furry, and very large feline cranium on the other side.
"She's my soul mate," he says fondly, as the tiger named Apata lolls her head and chuffs loudly. Then she strolls a few feet off to peer more closely at some strange faces—visitors to Tiger Haven, the sanctuary for large cats that Parker runs with his wife to care for animals abandoned or abused by their owners.
"Apata, be civil now," Parker says. "Act like a tiger. Be fierce." She nuzzles the fence again and flops over on her side, stretching out in the dust. Parker shakes his head in mock dismay.
The cat's languor belies the reality of life at Tiger Haven these days. The 10-acre enclave, home to three people, 27 tigers, 16 lions, and 22 assorted leopards, jaguars, and other cats, is anything but tranquil. At a meeting of the Roane County Commission on April 12, Parker will fight the latest round of a battle that could force him to either get rid of his animals or move. It's a zoning controversy that has pitted the well-being of 65 large cats against the fears of some of their neighbors. A forthright man with a colorful past—some would say too colorful—and a bristly stubborn streak, Parker gets quiet when he talks about the possible outcome. If he can't keep the cats, he says, he'll either have to kill them or place them in the same perilous situations from which many were rescued in the first place.
"If you had to make a decision for someone you loved, or for yourself, to either die now or live out the rest of your life in misery, what would you choose?" he asks. "It would be a hard choice. And certainly I'm going to do everything I can not to have to face it."
Harvey Road is a narrow strip of asphalt that winds past farmland and hollows in the secluded Cave Creek community at the eastern edge of Roane County. There's a church at the intersection with Cave Creek Road, and then widely spaced houses and barns and woods. A mile and a half along, a tall wooden fence runs at the roadside for 30 yards or so. There's just one sign next to it announcing the presence of Tiger Haven.
The large pen Apata shares with two other tigers is right in the middle of the sanctuary, the first thing you see when you turn in. Next to them on one side is Simba, who looks like a sizable lioness at first glance but is actually a liger (a lion-tiger crossbreed). In an enclosure nearby is India, the first cat Joe and Mary Lynn Parker ever acquired. That was in 1991.
The next one didn't come until 1994. On a walking tour of the facility, it's hard to believe the rest of the menagerie—not to mention the infrastructure that supports it—has arrived in just the five years since. Near the driveway, a cluster of buildings provides habitats for many of the Parkers' smaller breeds.
"Our enclosures are a pretty good size," Joe Parker says, pausing to look through the bars into one of the barn-like structures. "But we need to build bigger ones. We need to build a bigger enclosure in the woods for the snow leopards."
The snow leopards are among the most striking cats at Tiger Haven, acrobatic and stocky with thick milky fur. One, named K-2 after the Himalayan peak, came from the Nashville Zoo, which didn't have room for him anymore. The other, China, leaps from the floor of her pen onto a shelf about six feet up. She bats around a rubber chew toy for a moment before pulling it to her jaws. The pen next to hers is covered with plastic tarp on the outside. It's the home of Old Sam, a cougar who, at 17, is near the end of his natural lifespan. He suffers from arthritis and is under a heat lamp, Parker says—"We don't bother him too much."
Each pen or cage yields new names and stories, many of them sad. The first of several lion enclosures is a 2,500-square-foot patch of ground furnished with several low stacks of logs and inhabited by three cats. "This is Scar and his two women," Parker says. "Scar looked like a walking skeleton with skin draped over him when he got here. He was just about gone."
Scar had been a featured attraction at a South Carolina roadside zoo, a commercial enterprise in the median of a highway on the way to Myrtle Beach, between two gas stations. Many of the other animals came from similar backgrounds. Some were used as photo props for "Get your picture taken with a tiger!" businesses. Some were declawed, a painful procedure that can cripple them—"In Europe, it's illegal," says Mary Lynn Parker, a friendly woman in black overalls with reddish mane of her own. "It should be here."
Still other animals are refugees from what the Parkers say is a large but little-publicized market in exotic pets. Many states don't regulate the animal trade, and there are places you can buy them at auction. When untrained owners discover it's not easy caring for a 500- to 900-pound wild animal, they often have them killed. One lion, a bulky male named Bubba with a mane that covers his chest as well as his head, belonged to a drug dealer. Police seized him during a raid. Then they called Tiger Haven.
Joe Parker, a trim man in his early 50s wearing blue jeans, a black turtleneck and a tan safari vest, says most of his 65 cats have come from referrals. He estimates there are only about six big cat sanctuaries in the United States—or six "real" sanctuaries, by which he means places that don't breed or sell the animals—and just one besides Tiger Haven in the eastern half of the country. So once the Parkers' names got out in the exotic animal community, calls started coming from all over—including zoos.
"Zoos are creating big problems," Parker says. "Because they've got to have their cubs as attractions. But you know, cubs grow up, and they'll euthanize them and say they're doing it because they don't have enough space. But they don't tell you they breed them too."
"You don't see old or arthritic animals in a zoo," Mary Lynn adds.
The Parkers neuter almost all of their animals, except for a few members of rare breeds—white and golden tigers—that may be needed for propagation in the future. They say they've had only one set of cubs born, and that was an accident; the three lions produced in that litter are now adolescents and still live in the sanctuary.
To the untrained eye, Tiger Haven seems clean, relatively spacious, and well-maintained. The Parkers built the fences and cages themselves, but they seem as sturdy as those in any public animal park. With a slight breeze blowing, there's no discernible smell (the Parkers say they clean the pens every evening and put the waste in a sealed dumpster). Only periodic outbursts of primal roaring, mostly from the lions, give away the scope of the operation.
Those impressions are confirmed by the professionals who deal with Tiger Haven. Walter Cook, a captive wildlife coordinator for the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, inspects the Parkers' place once a year. He says Tiger Haven is held to the same standards as the state's municipal zoos. "Our concern is public safety, and we inspect the facility to make sure the animals are properly contained," he says. "They've been very good. They never question any recommendations we hand down."
Former TWRA officer Bill Holladay is even more complimentary. A Roane County native, he worked with the Parkers from when they got their first cat until his retirement last year. "Tiger Haven is a facility that has always been above par," he says. "Whatever we requested, they always went one step better." For example, he says, state law requires fences to be fastened to the ground; at Tiger Haven, they're rooted in concrete buried six inches in the dirt. No cat has ever escaped from a pen.
Knoxville veterinarian Nick Wright of the Kingston Pike Pet Hospital visits every few weeks to check on the cats. In a letter last month, Wright said animals are often malnourished or ill when they first arrive at the sanctuary, but their health improves quickly under the Parkers' care. "The general health of the large breed cats at Tiger Haven is good," he wrote.
So what's the problem? Well, it's a little complicated. The simplest explanation is that some of the Parkers' neighbors, mostly people who have lived along Harvey Road all their lives, don't like having wild animals in their backyards. They don't like the roars in the middle of the night. They don't like the smells they say emanate from the compound on humid summer days. And, TWRA permit or no TWRA permit, they don't like the idea of one or more of the predators escaping and roaming the woods around their homes.
Richard Bailey, a waste management supervisor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is the spokesman for the group. His wife's family, the Raymers, are longtime Harvey Road residents. Bailey says the Parkers only ever had permission for one tiger on their property; the rest of the cats are there in violation of county zoning.
"We're just neighbors that are concerned about our quality of life," he says. "Mr. Parker still has a right as far as we're concerned to live there with his one cat. But then it changed, and we feel like we've been violated."
Joe and Mary Lynn Parker, by their own account, never intended to have 65 cats. They didn't even intend to have one. Parker, a Knox County native, worked in several fields—including selling cemetery plots and mobile homes—before finding success in the booming Tennessee bingo industry of the 1980s. (Gov. Lamar Alexander legalized charitable bingo at the beginning of that decade.) Parker rose from calling games to owning and operating several bingo halls. But it came to an end in 1989 when he, along with dozens of other bingo operators and state officials, was snared by an anti-corruption probe called Operation Rocky Top. Some of those caught went to prison on long sentences. Parker was relatively unscathed, pleading guilty to federal tax evasion and serving just three months in a halfway house after cooperating with investigators. To this day, Parker—who is candid about his past—maintains the probe missed its largest targets, mostly catching small operators like himself who weren't reporting all of their income.
Meanwhile, in the late 1980s, the Parkers had started volunteering at the Knoxville Zoo. Parker donated some of the charity proceeds from his games to the park. The couple became especially enamored of the zoo's tiger cubs. "We had a peaceful feeling around them," Parker says simply. When the cubs got too big for volunteers to work with, the Parkers became interested in getting a tiger of their own. The circumstances of their first cat acquisition are guarded by a court agreement, but Parker says he and Mary Lynn managed to extract India from a potentially abusive situation.
That same year, they moved from Knox County to Harvey Road with plans to buy enough land to build a small cat collection. Zoning was still a new thing in the county in 1991, and Parker's land was zoned A-1—an all-purpose agricultural designation that at the time allowed exotic animals as well as livestock.
Bailey says he and several other neighbors were worried—"I think anybody would be concerned about a 500-pound dangerous cat in your neighborhood, not knowing the people or circumstances"—and asked the county's Planning Commission to protect them against future expansion. The commission responded by creating an A-2 zone specifically for exotic animals, disallowing them in A-1 areas.
What came next is a little unclear, as both the Parkers and their neighbors accuse each other of malice and harassment. But in a maze of accusations about hidden agendas and inside politics (the Parkers' version is spelled out on their website, www.tigerhaven.org), the central issue remains whether Tiger Haven can exist in what is still an A-1 zone. Roane County Commission turned down Parker's request to rezone 30 acres he owns behind Tiger Haven to A-2, which would have allowed him to expand. Then, in 1997, the commission—at what Parker says was the neighbors' behest—filed suit to shut down Tiger Haven altogether. Parker contended his cats should be grandfathered under the zoning laws that were in place when he bought the property. In February, Roane County Chancellor Frank V. Williams III ruled against him and ordered the removal of all cats except India.
That left Parker with two options—appeal Williams' ruling, which he is doing; and try to get his original 10 acres, where all of the animals are, rezoned from A-1 to A-2. His first success came last month, when the county's Planning Commission voted to recommend the rezoning. Parker credits the victory partly to public outcry; he says 500 to 700 people turned out for the meeting.
Among the supporters is the Roane County Humane Society. "Our board of directors is very pleased that the Planning Commission voted to recommend A-2 status for Tiger Haven," board member Katie Duran says. "This really isn't an issue of public safety regarding the tigers. The TWRA has monitored the facility for eight years, and there have been no problems." Parker says many of his neighbors, including all of those who actually adjoin his property, also support Tiger Haven. Bailey concedes the neighborhood is split.
But Roane County Commission has the final say on the rezoning, and that worries Parker. He's especially angry that only eight of the 15 commissioners have actually come out to see the sanctuary for themselves. Even Bailey admits he's never been on Parker's property.
"My walking in there and getting a little warm fuzzy feeling about how well-maintained it is isn't going to affect these other basic issues," he insists.
County officials don't seem eager to comment on the case. A secretary in the office of County Executive Ken Yager referred questions to attorney Jack McPherson, whom the county hired to take Tiger Haven to court. McPherson didn't return a phone call.
If he doesn't get the rezoning, Parker says he'll file legal appeals. But he knows he can only fight so long. To fund Tiger Haven, which he says costs more than $160,000 a year, Parker relies entirely on donations. He also picks up odd jobs—computer programming, earth moving—"to make money to live on."
(He initially funded the sanctuary by re-opening a bingo hall in Fountain City in the mid-'90s, exploiting what he believed was a loophole in the state's anti-gambling laws. Publicity of the operation, and of Parker's criminal record, led to a state attorney general's opinion that shut the hall down. The same opinion led to cancellation of the annual Great Rubber Duck Race in Knoxville, which raised funds for the Boys and Girls Club. Parker believes lingering resentment of that fallout has colored Knoxville media reports about Tiger Haven.)
He just hired a national fundraising firm for the first time, and he says response has been strong. But even if he wins the rezoning battle, he's afraid he'll never be able to expand onto his other 30 acres. Some of Parker's supporters suggest he'd be better off to simply reduce the number of cats he keeps. He acknowledges that some of the animals, especially the rare breeds, could probably find other homes.
"Asia, Apata, there's places that would take them because they carry four color genes—white, golden, snow white, and standard," he says. "But they'd be used for breeders."
Surveying the compound he's built with his own hands and the cats he knows by name and face and personality traits, he says, "We'd be a lot happier if we had 10 cats. They'd be easier to take care of, cheaper to feed, you could spend more time with them. But when you know what's going to happen to them, it's hard to turn them down."
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