- [Narrator] When I was a kid,
I had a pet tiger.
But he was imaginary.
And that's, as far as I'm willing to go
into big cat ownership.
Because owning a real tiger has a huge cost.
- I am never gonna financially recover from this.
- [Narrator] Not just in money,
but potentially in lives and limbs,
and for both humans and tigers.
So especially if you are,
for whatever reason,
considering a big cat purchase,
please watch because we're gonna try to figure out
exactly how much you'd have to spend
to be a crazy big cat owner.
We'll explain.
(upbeat country music)
Maybe the biggest cost of owning a tiger
is the one that the tiger pays.
Because whether the owners have good or bad intentions,
captivity is a lifelong burden on big cats.
On the bad end of the scale,
pay to pet operations
where people pay to get that tiger selfie
have come under fire for serious neglect and abuse.
And according to a 2015 study,
they're more common than you might think
with 77 such institutions in America.
Undercover stings by animal welfare groups
have revealed how baby tigers are separated
from their mothers in an early age and excessively handled.
Imagine being groped by 27 strangers per day,
and you have ringworm.
That's cub life.
But it gets worse.
The undercover operatives also witnessed young cubs
beaten, prodded, tossed,
and held by their tails by their keepers
to get them to perform.
Cubs that make it have a grim future,
perhaps serving as breeding stock
in one of America's estimated 50 tiger mills.
Yes, like puppy mills, but for tigers.
But unwanted adults may just disappear
into America's tiger black hole.
But even if you're a good owner,
there's still a cost paid by the cat.
To put it simply,
even the best kind of captivity drives wild animals insane.
This pacing behavior is just one symptom of zoochosis,
a mental illness of captive animals.
It manifests in abnormal behaviors like excessive grooming,
regurgitating food, biting bars, and more.
It can be combated with enrichment activities,
but that's often a bandaid,
because a tiger's life in the wild
is a rich sensory experience,
in a territory that measures in square miles.
Captivity condenses that to square feet.
I did find one concrete measurement
of the stress we cause tigers.
In a 2004 study,
scientists found the tigers moved by their handlers
had a 239% spike in their stress hormones,
even three to six days following the event.
So let's not kid ourselves.
Captivity may sometimes be the only option,
but that doesn't mean there isn't a cost to it.
(intense music)
- [Man] A tiger cub in the backyard of a home-
- [Narrator] Now to you, the human,
before we even get to how hard and expensive it is
to care for a tiger in your backyard,
it's worth reminding you how good they are at killing you,
because that's a huge potential cost to big cat ownership.
Even though this isn't always clear from "Tiger King,"
tigers are really good at it.
Their arsenal is way better than yours,
including three inch-teeth and five-inch retractable claws
mounted onto a 400-pound muscle tank.
But that's just an average.
A tiger found in an abandoned home in Houston
weighed in at 1,000 pounds.
And that weight helps with the tigers go-to finisher,
the pounce and bite to the back of the neck of their prey.
So that their long teeth wedge in
between the cervical vertebrae and sever the spinal cord.
And they're hunting things like deer and even buffalo,
so your puny human neck isn't going to hold up.
So you're not gonna win a fight,
but you can't outrun them either,
because tigers are better athletes than olympians.
Usain Bolt has hit about 28 miles per hour
in a short sprint.
Tigers can go up to 60.
They have a 30-foot jump,
beating Mike Powell's still unbroken 1991 world record.
And finally, they have a 12-foot vertical leap,
enough to actually clear a basketball hoop.
Take that, dream team.
But surely, primate intelligence must make some difference.
Ehh, maybe not as much as you'd hope.
While this obviously isn't an exact comparison,
according to studies
of South Africa's Kruger National Park,
70% of the baboons killed there were killed by leopards.
A similarly solitary ambush style big cat.
So tigers are equipped to kill you.
But those who are pro tiger ownership might point out
that in terms of the deadliest animals in the wild,
tigers aren't near the top.
Snakes, lions, even elephants cause more deaths per year.
But part of that might just be
the wild tiger's severely diminished range in population.
Nine subspecies used to roam
throughout this huge tiger triangle,
and now there are only about 4,000,
mostly concentrated in India.
In regions where tiger numbers are highest,
you still find stories of man-eaters,
and go back in time to when their numbers were healthier,
and the deaths increase.
Some scholars have estimated that in two centuries,
tigers killed 373,000 people.
That's huge.
In fact, back in the first half of the 19th century,
they were almost talked about like serial killers
with names, The Bachelor of Powalgarh
or The Champawat Trigress,
the latter of which was blamed for over 400 deaths.
So tiger hunters were celebrities.
British Colonel John Corbett took care
of both The Bachelor and The Tigress,
and wrote bestsellers about it
that became major motion pictures.
But besides population loss,
there is another reason scientists give
to explain wild tigers' passivity.
We confuse them.
Unlike anything they hunt,
we're more oriented on the Y-axis.
We're taller than tigers,
so whatever you do, probably don't do this.
It takes away the one advantage you have,
it makes you look more like prey.
But despite their low numbers and uncertainty around men,
tigers who get used to us have a reputation
as being almost vengeful killers.
They seem to go after humans they don't like.
In 2007, a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo
jumped out of its enclosure,
which was 4.5 feet below the required height,
and attacked three teenagers
that federal investigators said had likely provoked it.
The tiger killed one,
then followed a trail of bloods to the others,
ignoring potential food along the way.
And in 1997,
another tiger in Russia went after a poacher who shot it
and stole its catch.
It not only destroyed the poacher's cabin,
anything with his scent,
it also laid in wait up to 48 hours to eat him.
It really does feel vindictive.
So you can understand why the region's Udege people
speak of the Amba, a tiger's dark side,
which comes out when they're wrong.
These biological weapons attack
even their keepers with surprising frequency.
So do you ever really wanna see their darker side?
Make no mistake,
a pet tiger might cost you
something priceless and unquantifiable, your life.
But maybe you're either brave or stupid enough
to ignore that.
While there's still plenty of concrete ways
a tiger will cost you.
The most obvious is the cost of the tiger itself,
typically purchased as cute little cubs.
Carol Baskin has written that they go for $7,500 and up.
But I wanted to check.
And boy, are there tons of websites
that purport to sell tiger cubs.
Some go as low as 2,000 others as high as 15.
And that's just the start,
'cause at a minimum,
cats require land, a home, containment, food,
medical care, and licensing.
Assuming you already have the land,
and some states require five acres
with a national average cost of 12,000 per acre,
the enclosure is the largest upfront cost,
but I didn't know how to size and build it.
See, federal laws around exotic wildlife
are riddled with exemptions
and loosely enforced.
And some states have little or no regulations at all.
So there's no standard rule I could find
for how much space a tiger requires.
The animal welfare act which gives licenses to zoos,
Vaguely tells you what a tiger enclosure
needs to be, sort of.
And unfortunately, it turns out
that experts really don't wanna be on the record
for a "Tiger King" story.
- This is may way of livin'
and nobody's gonna tell me any other way.
(bomb explodes)
- [Narrator] But there are guides out there
made by zoological associations,
so I went with those.
The Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the AZA,
says that the minimum tiger enclosure
needs to be 40 by 40 feet,
but that new habitat should be between 2,500
and 10,000 square feet.
A small house to a tiger big mansion,
with some recommended upgrades
to enhance a tiger's quality of life.
A lot of it would be natural,
but for the outdoor concrete portion,
I look to pool construction for pricing.
That's 55 to $125 per square foot.
Coming to around $36,000
for a quarter of the smallest habitat.
But state-of-the-art enclosures
like LSU's tiger habitat for their mascot, Mike,
can cost almost $1 million to build,
and that's just one tiger.
The enclosure needs to be enlarged by 50%
with each new animal,
because despite this shot,
tigers are typically solitary in the wild.
But you've probably already noticed a problem.
There's nothing to stop our tiger
from leaving it's enclosure.
Bars, mesh, glass, even moats,
all are acceptable to the AZA
if big and thick enough.
But you have to be exceedingly careful
because they can still get out.
Fencing needs to be 16 feet high
with the top slanted inward to prevent climbing.
And it needs to go three feet into the earth
to stop digging.
Trees can't be planted nearby,
and moats with smooth unclimbable walls, mind you,
can never freeze over.
Big Cat Rescue says that a tiger cage will run you $10,000.
And that seems reasonable
when a regular short chain link fence averages $3,000
for 150 linear feet.
But there are recurring costs around the enclosure too,
and not always ones you'd expect.
You might not think about pest control,
but decaying meat and big cat fecal matter
draw pests in.
And it's important to handle
because tigers can get things like rabies.
And aren't tigers dangerous enough without rabies?
Cleaning and gardening are also important
if for no other reason
than because big cat urine is corrosive.
Although weirdly it smells like buttered popcorn.
And they're wired to spray it over everything
to mark their territory.
These add up.
Online calculators put the upkeep costs at around 24k,
assuming you want to pay someone else to do it.
Then of course, comes food,
because the Tiger's gonna eat something.
In the wild, the hooved animals favored by tigers
can weigh anywhere from 65 to 2,000 pounds,
but the supply isn't constant.
So some studies suggest wild tigers only eat on average,
15 pounds of meat per day.
Sedentary captive tigers eat even less.
According to zoo keepers, around 10 pounds.
But that's still a lot,
we'll show you.
If you went retail,
chunk steak is going for 7.39 per pound
at Walmart right now.
And although captive tigers often fast two days per week
to mimic their wild cousins' irregular food supply,
that still equals $19,000 per year per tiger.
Believe it or not,
there are actually legit commercial tiger feed vendors
who enrich their foods with certain nutrients
as tigers are susceptible to deficiencies.
But there's still a problem.
Exclusive use of commercial food may inhibit a tiger
acting like a tiger,
As in the wild, they seem to relish eating organs first
and gnawing bones after.
So the feeding of whole prey and bones to tigers
is cautiously condoned by the AZA.
And it'll run you 35 bucks per rabbit treat,
or maybe $800 per year.
Despite what, ahem, economies Joe might have found,
most sources say a tiger's food
will cost over $10,000 per year.
And though they seem above it all,
even tigers get the sniffles. (tiger sniffles)
So vets are very necessary.
But vets like these are hard to find.
Not everyone can handle an ornery 600 pound patient.
Zoo guidelines recommend,
at the very least,
a vet on call 24/7,
plus two inspections per month
and a physical every year.
It sounds doable until you remember
that a tiger needs to either be anesthetized
for a vet doing house calls
or transported to the vet's office with special equipment,
including a huge movement limiting squeeze cage,
and a vehicle equipped to carry it.
Together, those can run you $58,000.
There are credible accounts of annual bills
around 5,000 per tiger,
but apparently, sometimes single visits can cost that much,
so expect to pay up.
Finally, you're gonna wanna make sure
that that expensive tiger's paperwork is in order,
or it could be confiscated.
Every state has a different scheme,
but we looked at Florida because
it was a big importer of Joe Exotic's tigers.
Technically, there's no private ownership
of big cats in Florida,
but you can't possess them via a commercial license,
which is some work experience,
some references, and $150 fee.
Not the heaviest burden,
but there's also a financial responsibility requirement.
And a tiger insurance policy worth $2 million
can cost anywhere between 1,000 and 1,500 thousand per year.
Okay, adding it all up.
Assuming we started from scratch
and went all out on everything,
the first year cost of owning a tiger
is somewhere over $375,000.
But tigers in captivity can live
up to 20 years, sometimes more.
So according to our calculations,
and obviously, this is missing things like taxes,
that could bring the lifetime cost of just one tiger
to over 1.1 million at the highest range.
Even at the lower level,
it's still over half a mill.
Think about this.
The cost of raising a child through age 17
for middle income parents is just $230,000
according to the USDA.
You could have four kids.
Until the Big Cat Public Safety Act is passed,
and it's currently awaiting a vote in the Senate,
big cat ownership will be legal in some areas.
Just think hard if it's worth the many costs.
(upbeat country music)