The New Yorker, February 18, 2002 P. 95

POPULAR CHRONICLES about animal hoarders and about the legal troubles of Joan Byron-Marasek, who irritated neighbors in her community with her collection of tigers... She lived in Jackson, New Jersey, which is in Ocean County... Tells how on January 27, 1999, a tiger was noticed roaming loose in the region, and police investigated her compound while attempting to determine where the tiger had originated... The Maraseks moved to Jackson in 1976, with Bombay, Chinta, Iman, Jaipur, and Maya, five tigers they had got from an animal trainer named David McMillan. They bought land in a featureless and barely populated part of town near Holmeson’s Corner, where Monmouth Road and Millstone Road intersect. It was a good place to raise tigers... For a long time, there were no restrictions in New Jersey on owning wildlife. But beginning in 1971, after regular reports of monkey bites and tiger maulings, exotic-animal owners had to register with the state. Dangerous exotic animals were permitted only if it could be shown that they were needed for education or performance or research. Byron-Marasek held both the necessary New Jersey permit and an exhibitor’s license from the United States Department of Agriculture, which supervises animal welfare nationally... Byron-Marasek called her operation the Tigers Only Preservation Society. Its stated mission was, among other things, to conserve all tiger species, to return captive tigers to the wild, and "to resolve the human/tiger conflict and create a resolution."... Tells how state inspectors determined that Byron-Marasek had at least seventeen tigers living in what they considered sorry conditions, and that the animals were being kept not for theatrical or educational purposes but as illegal pets... It is not hard to buy a tiger. Only eight states prohibit the ownership of wild animals; three states have no restrictions whatsoever; and the rest have regulations that range from trivial to modest and are barely enforced. Exotic-animal auction houses and animal markets thrive in the Midwest and the Southeast, where wildlife laws are the most relaxed. Writer describes the prices for several exotic species... Between 1990 and 2000, Jackson’s population increased by almost a third, and cranberry farms and chicken farms began yielding to condominiums and center-hall Colonials. In 1997, a model house was built on the land immediately east of the Maraseks’ compound, and in the next two years thirty more houses went up... Writer mentions that she never actually saw a tiger until she was wandering around behind a neighbor’s house one day, and finally saw one pacing on the other side of Byron-Marasek’s fence...

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