[FEL-L] RE: Nice kitty ... please, nice kitty (long)

[Bigcats10 at aol.com]

Today: August 01, 2006 at 7:29:24  PDT  
Nice kitty ... please, nice kitty 
Do exotic pets still have a place in a not-so-wild Wild West? 
By Brendan Buhler 
Las Vegas Sun  
The leopard has been snarling and pacing since you arrived. Your palm is  
pressed against the chain-link fence.  
Krrring!  
The leopard hits the fence at neck level, fangs first, massive paws framing  
its face.  
"He can smell your fear," says the woman inside the cage, with the leopard.  
Playing, in fact, with the leopard. Slapping its taught black flanks.  
Scratching it behind its flattened ears. Pulling its twitching and bristling  tail. 
She tells you that the animal is just testing you, that you shouldn't  flinch 
if you want to gain its respect. Relax. The woman tousles the short black  
hair on the back of the leopard's head.  
You nod and focus on the slight, calm woman and not on her pet.  
Krrring! Snarl!  
It doesn't do to forget about a leopard.  
"Oh James," the woman says. "You silly cat."  
'I guess I like living on the edge .'  
Meet Marianne Slama and James Wilde of Pahrump: A lady and her leopard.  
Depending on whom you ask, the pair is either a vanishing breed or part of a  
growing menace. Almost everyone will say that Slama is nuts to keep James as 
a  pet.  
James is a 3-year-old African leopard and black as crude oil, except when the 
 light catches him and he looks like chocolate with dark spots. He's about 30 
 inches tall, 44 inches long (not counting a 39-inch tail) and weighs, by 
Slama's  guess, 150 pounds. James comes fully loaded with the equipment and 
instincts to  kill.  
Slama is a 45-year-old sometime-showgirl and sometime-production manager with 
 blond hair and deeply tanned skin. She's 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighs, by 
her  own guess, 120 pounds. She carries a wooden "no-no stick" less than a 
foot long  in her back pocket.  
If they ever fight, Slama will probably die. But so far they seem to get  
along. He was only a kitten when she got him in 2003 as a payment-in-trade for  
catsitting him and five other leopards.  
Every morning, first thing, Slama unlocks her front door, pads across her  
concrete yard and pops into a cage with James.  
"Usually I'm in a G-string and flip flops," she says. "But today since I had  
company, I thought I'd put my clothes on."  
She says the thing with leopards is that they're unpredictable.  
(Although not entirely so. Important Tip No. 1: Don't get lower than the  
leopard. You'll resemble prey.)  
"When you walk in the cage, you never know what the cat's going to do," Slama 
 says. "I guess I like living on the edge - it's pretty fun."  
Most days she lets James roam inside her house with her for about an hour.  
And she likes talking about the danger, too. She has several well-loved lines  
about it, like: "People ask, 'Does your cat bite?' No, I say, he kills."  
Which is one of the reasons she doesn't let James lick her hand or face or  
anything else, no matter how cute some people think that is.  
"That licking thing? They lick their food. Lick, lick, chomp," Slama says.  
"How many licks does it take to get to the center of the Tootsie Pop? Not very  
many."  
When James eats, after the licking, he makes loud slurping and popping sounds 
 over his pile of chicken parts. It soon disappears, bones and all.  
The Endangered Eccentric  
Nevada is known for tolerating all sorts of eccentricity, a tradition that's  
included large and especially toothsome pets. But as the state has grown, the 
 residents of subdivisions and master-planned communities have proved 
disinclined  to live next to carnivorous megafauna.  
Big cats are illegal in Henderson. They're tightly regulated in Las Vegas and 
 their numbers have been on the decline for decades. And Clark County is 
looking  to tighten regulations on the 200 or so lions, tigers and oh-mys in its  
jurisdiction.  
Nye County has an ordinance: Anyone who wants to keep a wild animal is  
supposed to get a permit from the sheriff. No one currently bothers to do so.  
However, Nye County - Pahrump in particular - is rapidly growing. While once  
Slama had no neighbors within shouting distance, now stucco subdivisions are  
sprouting up around her. An elementary school was built a mile and half away.  
Amid such growth, Nye County officials are talking about tightening their  
wild animal regulations.  
Slama says she's not worried. Even though she's not required to, she holds an 
 Agriculture Department exhibitor's license for James and has her cages and  
fences regularly inspected.  
"I've got to protect my rights," Slama said.  
Nationally, though, she's swimming against the tide.  
Groups such as the Humane Society and the Captive Wild Animal Protection  
Coalition are pushing to outlaw possession of wild animals as pets or show  
animals. In 2003, animal-welfare activists persuaded Congress to outlaw  interstate 
traffic in big cats. (The Senate bill was co-sponsored by Sen. John  Ensign, 
R-Nev.)  
"Go to a local shelter and pick up a dog or a cat," Beth Preiss, a Humane  
Society spokeswoman, says. "Don't get a wild animal."  
How dangerous is a pet leopard?  
"There's no wisdom in at all," says Karen Killmar, associate curator of  
mammals San Diego Zoo. "These are animals that can very easily do great bodily  
harm, even kill. It's not something that they do wrong. It's just part of their  
nature - they're predators. They hunt and eat prey, and the human species is 
a  prey animal."  
The San Diego Zoo does not allow its keepers into a pen with a big cat in it. 
 
When big cats attack, the results are usually dire. The danger comes not so  
much from their long, piercing teeth as the immense pressure their jaws 
inflict.  Bones shatter, tissue is crushed and blood vessels are torn, says Dr. Jay 
Coates  of University Medical Center's trauma unit. He estimates he treats 
maybe one  victim a year, although except for the mauling of Roy Horn of 
"Siegfried &  Roy" in 2003, he hasn't seen any victims of massive attacks.  
"Those people usually don't make it to the hospital. They're usually dead,"  
Coates said. "If a 400-pound tiger decides you're lunch, there's not a lot  
you're going to do about it once they get hold of you."  
Instead, in the cases he sees, the damage is so much less than what the  
animal is capable of inflicting that he thinks the animals are playing or  
irritated, not hungry.  
But how frequent are the attacks?  
By the Captive Wild Animal Protection Coalition's most recent count in 2004,  
there were 44 attacks by big cats in the U.S. However, it estimates that 
there  are 10,000 “20,000 privately owned big cats. That means that less than one 
half  of 1 percent of them are attacking.  
If the coalition's numbers are to be believed, pet dogs are more likely at  
that rate to hurt people badly enough to send them to an emergency room.  
Still, for safety's sake, James' locked steel cages have tops as well as  
sides, and Slama's 5-acre compound is ringed with tall fences topped with barbed  
wire. The barbed wire slants outward. In Nye County, there are no rules 
saying  how secure a leopard pen has to be, but Slama has hers inspected by federal 
 regulators, just to be sure. Slama says she worries much more about people  
sneaking in and bothering the leopard than the other way around.  
"I'm not bigger than him, but I do make him think I am."  
Because he knows her and because she's trained him, Slama believes that James 
 will not attack her. More than that, she believes she's exceptional. She 
will  not be attacked because she is fearless; because she's smarter than the 
cat.  
"I've got my mind," Slama says. "That's my strength. I'm not bigger than him, 
 but I do make him think I am."  
It's an attitude common in fighter pilots, race car drivers and stockbrokers: 
 It can't happen - I'm too good. And if they see someone crash or get  hauled 
away by the IRS? They made a mistake.  
"When something happens," Slama says, "it's the human's fault, not the  
animal's."  
But Killmar says that's not necessarily the case. Just because you know a big 
 animal doesn't mean you can predict or control a large predator.  
"Something happens that will startle that animal or they pick up a scent that 
 pushes a button in their brain. With no warning whatever, they become a 
totally  different animal, and that's when people get seriously hurt and killed," 
Killmar  says.  
The most famous case of this unpredictability, of course, is the 2003 mauling 
 of Horn on stage at the Mirage. Siegfried and Roy preformed this show more 
than  5,500 times with a variety of cats without incident. And then it went 
wrong.  
Montecore, a 380-pound, 7-year-old white tiger, bit Horn's arm. Montecore  
then clamped his jaws around Horn's neck and dragged him offstage. Damage from  
the attack caused Horn's trachea to collapse and led to a stroke for the  
illusionist, who remains partially paralyzed. The pair has said that Horn  fainted 
and Montecore was merely dragging him to safety, an idea that zoologists  
scorn. They note that tigers kill by biting the neck and suffocating their prey.  
Is it good for the cat?  
In the wild, leopards are largely solitary animals that patrol territories of 
 several miles. James lives most of his life in a series of eight-feet tall,  
24-foot-by-12-foot cages, although he does get to come into the house nearly  
every day, and sometimes Slama takes him out for a walk. (He likes to stalk 
the  horse trails - see below.)  
Wild leopards can live for 12 to 15 years. Captive leopards have lived for up 
 to 23 years.  
Leopards need a lot of space, things to climb, sun breaks to sleep beneath  
and water to splash in, Killmar says. James has at least the last three of  
those. Large carnivores require a diet richer than the grocery story can  
provide. Slama says she takes care of that. On inspection, James' coat is glossy  and 
he seems energetic.  
(For the record, in addition to the chicken, once a week James gets a zoo  
feed of vitamin-fortified horse meat. Important Tip No. 2: Don't feed a predator 
 live meat, lest they get used to it.)  
But Killmar also says that leopards, although mostly solitary in the wild,  
need contact with other members of their species.  
James does not have that.  
"He's got it all."  
What James does have is Slama's complete and utter devotion.  
As a girl, Slama used to daydream about herself as a grown-up, fashionably  
dressed and turning heads as she walked down the street, two lions at her 
sides.  In 1991, she took a step toward that goal when she fell in love with an 
animal  trainer. They moved to Pahrump and started a family of sorts: lions, 
chimps,  servals, a cougar named Elvis. And of course, a leopard.  
"Obviously I loved the cats more than the guy. It took me seven years to  
figure that out," she says.  
At the end of the relationship, she kept her house and her first leopard,  
Alvin. And then Alvin fell ill with a mysterious nervous ailment that vets would 
 later diagnose as distemper. Over seven weeks, Slama says, she spent $6,000 
on  spinal taps, CT scans and even a homeopathic animal healer. Nothing 
worked. Near  the end, she was feeding the leopard through a tube and sleeping next 
to him. He  died in her arms in 2001.  
She keeps Alvin's ashes in a cognac bottle with a black leopard on its label. 
 She also keeps his skull and his hide, the latter of which she held up and 
used  as a puppet until her eyes welled up and she put it down and petted it.  
She got James in 2003. It's made dating rough. And no one can quite measure  
up to James.  
"I wish I could find a man like the cat," she says. "Someone to be that  
aggressive and that passionate and that subtle. To be able to protect me like  
that and love me. He's got it all."  
"It's so unnatural, but it's just so wonderful."  
If you see James just out of the corner of your eye, his tongue lolling out  
and his head thrown back as Slama pets him and mists him with a hose - at that 
 indistinct angle, happily panting away, well, James looks like a big 
Labrador  retriever.  
And then he turns to look at you just as you look at him. He stares back at  
you with large blue feline eyes and slowly flicks a massive, gritty tongue 
over  golf tee-sized teeth.  
"When I'm face to face with him," Slama says, "it's so unnatural, but it's  
just so wonderful."  
It's one point on which Slama and Killmar can agree. As much as she thinks  
it's unwise and unkind to keep leopards as pets, Killmar admits that sometimes  
she wishes she could touch one, and play with a fear older than human 
history.  
"Maybe part of it is that they are a predator. Back before we had weapons and 
 we were much more a prey species, these were animals that we would avoid at 
all  costs because chances are that we wouldn't walk away from a 
confrontation,"  Killmar says. "But, now that we can interact with them and contain them, 
when I  think about the beauty of the animals and their majesty - not to be 
dramatic,  but they are. They're incredible animals. They're intelligent.  
"They're fun to be around, you know, they really are." Brendan Buhler  can be 
reached at 259-8817 or at buhler at lasvegassun.com. 
_http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-other/2006/aug/01/566636152.html
_ 
(http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-other/2006/aug/01/566636152.html) 
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