April 6 2014
See video:
Animals seized by TWRA, 2009 - 2013
Turtles: 118
Snakes: 98
Raccoons: 23
Alligators: 6
Deer: 6
Coyotes: 5
Squirrels: 4
Skunks: 2
Vultures: 2
Bobcats: 1
Quaker
Parakeets: 1
·
Dudley loved his pacifier. His sister Opossum loved vanilla ice cream.
And every day the 2-year-olds sat on the
couch with stuffed animals and watched "How The Grinch Stole
Christmas."
At night, when they couldn't sleep, they'd
crawl up into Tisha Morgan's bed and nuzzle into her face. She would lull them
back to sleep with a bottle of warm infant formula.
"That's just how much babies they
were," said Morgan, who was given the two raccoons in the spring of 2012.
But those tender moments are gone now.
Last October, while Morgan was out of town,
seven state wildlife officers and a Polk
County officer entered her opulent,
11,000-square-foot home in Delano,
Tenn., and took the animals. A
woman who rents a room from the Morgans and was home at the time said the
officers were wearing bulletproof vests and "combat pants."
The raccoons were taken to a veterinarian,
who euthanized them. Then, in accordance with standard procedure, the vet said,
he removed their brains so they could be sent to Knoxville to be tested for rabies. The tests
came back negative.
"I hit the floor; I was squalling,"
Morgan said of the day she returned home to find the raccoons gone and
"The Grinch" still playing on the TV. "They were like my
children."
The raid was spawned by a tip from Morgan's
former housekeeper, who told state wildlife officials the raccoons had attacked
her. The same woman is now entangled in a legal battle with the family over the
raccoons and is suing for $600,000.
The former employee said the animals left her
with post-traumatic stress and panic attacks.
Several months later, Morgan won't let the
new housekeeper wipe the paw prints from the breakfast nook window, where the
raccoons used to peer out to the backyard. Her phone is filled with photos and
videos of moments like Opossum's first bowl of ice cream. She still has Dudley's doll-sized baseball cap and his pacifier, with
its half-shredded nipple.
Lorane McCarty, of Powell, Tenn.,
has felt the same pain. Two summers ago, she and her husband adopted a fawn
that was injured and appeared motherless.
They fed him apples and gave him a blanket to
sleep on the porch. McCarty taught him tricks in the front yard.
"I'd say, 'Come on Buddy, jump on my
back,'" she said. "He was something else; everybody loved him."
But the wildlife agents came for Buddy, too.
One afternoon last year, men with guns came to her home and gave her and her
husband an ultimatum: Sign Buddy away, or have him taken by order of seizure.
McCarty gave up the deer, and an incident report written by one of the officers
says that they euthanized the deer shortly after taking it from McCarty's home.
"They just took him straight out and
killed him," McCarty said.
•••
It's a human impulse to bond with animals,
even wild ones. They can appear so loyal, so doting, so loving. And then there
is the soft fur and the big eyes.
It's easy to ignore their teeth. It's easy to
ignore their diseases, their nature.
So in Tennessee
there's an agency that exists, in part, to protect us from ourselves. The
Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency aims to keep people and dangerous animals
separated from one another.
Yet Morgan, McCarty and others describe the
TWRA as an agency out of control, overzealous in its efforts to seize animals
that seemingly pose no danger to anyone. In the past five years, TWRA officers
have taken at least 266 animals from residents by confiscating them or telling
their owners that they must be surrendered.
While forcing people to give up their pets
breaks hearts, the TWRA said keeping people and dangerous animals away from
each other is for everyone's safety.
Raccoons can carry rabies, and deer can
become territorial as they mature. Even a turtle can be a killer: A child may
lick its shell and contract salmonella, the TWRA warns.
·
"We understand that there's a lot of
animals you'll connect with, that you may find that's cute or cuddly, or
pretty, and you may feel even sorry for them," said TWRA Officer Joe
McSpadden. But, he said, "we try to encourage the public not to approach,
not to disturb those animals."
That encouragement can take many forms.
Often, when the TWRA finds out that somebody is keeping an outlawed species,
officers will simply ask the person to surrender it, either to be taken to a
rehabilitation program or zoo, or to be put down. But sometimes search and
seizure are their tactics.
Officers will show up unannounced, sometimes
in intimidating numbers.
"It was about 7 in the morning. The
doorbell rang, my kids were in the bed," said Chad Duggin, of Murfreesboro, who had
been keeping an illegal snake.
He opened the door to see several TWRA
officers, he said.
Duggin believes that an undercover TWRA
officer posing as a reptile dealer had been watching him for months. At the
time Duggin was arrested in 2006, the TWRA was carrying out a major undercover
push to stop the trafficking of venomous reptiles in Tennessee.
Even though Duggin said his cobra's venom
glands had been removed, the snake was still illegal in Tennessee.
Usually people will surrender their animals
once they find out that they aren't supposed to have them, according to the
TWRA. Handcuffs are rare. Drawn guns are almost unheard of, unless "there
were an imminent threat," said Walter Cook, the captive wildlife
coordinator at the TWRA. It's his experience, Cook said, that people will say
officers were wielding weapons even if they weren't.
"They had guns drawn," Duggin said.
"They came straight in, grabbed me, cuffed me."
•••
Because of the way the TWRA keeps records,
it's hard to know exactly what happens when officers take animals from people's
homes. Generally, they report that they took an animal, but they don't have to
record what they do with it, said Cook. In most cases, officers take animals to
a rehabilitation center or zoo. Euthanasia, Cook said, is a last resort.
"Other states don't have this extreme
regulatory scheme," said Chris Jones, a Chattanooga attorney who specializes in
wildlife law. "Tennessee
is made fun of, just how Draconian it is."
Jones has likened the TWRA to the Gestapo.
Others have called Tennessee's
wildlife laws "communist," and the agency that enforces them
"over the top."
Here, residents aren't allowed to take any
native species from the wild, not even turtles, said David Favre, a professor
at the Animal Legal and Historical
Center at Michigan State
University College of Law.
Many other states, such as Kentucky
and Missouri,
have a more moderate approach. Those states allow residents to keep many of the
species outlawed in Tennessee.
Snakes, raccoons and turtles are the most
common animals that the TWRA takes. They have also taken away people's pet
skunks, squirrels and even vultures. The five-year tally of 266 includes a few
seizures of large collections of animals, the biggest being the 53 poisonous
snakes that the TWRA took from pastor Andrew Hamblin's serpent-handling church
in LaFollette last year.
"Innocent people have been abused by
[the TWRA], and it all links to this individual," said Jones the attorney,
arguing that Cook, the TWRA gatekeeper to permits, is unfair in his enforcement
of the law.
Cook disagrees. He said Tennessee's strict laws and rigid
enforcement make its captive wildlife program the best in the country. Sitting
in his Nashville office among his hunting trophies -- mounted fish, tail
feathers and an antlered skull -- he explained that 23 other states have
asked for a copy of Tennessee's laws to help shape their own.
"It lays out in very clear manner what
you can and can't do," said Cook. "And not allowing the personal
possession of dangerous wildlife is very appealing to most citizens of every
state."
•••
Cook has been granting and denying wildlife
possession permits for about 20 years. He wouldn't let the Times Free Press
photograph him because sometimes he likes to go unrecognized while poking
around captive wildlife sites. Generally, Cook gives permits to circuses, zoos
and sanctuaries that meet certain requirements, but individuals are denied in
almost every circumstance.
It's not just native wildlife that Tennessee is strict
about. The state has stringent requirements for keeping exotic wildlife, too.
Before a law was enacted in 1991, the public could keep dangerous species, like
lions, cougars and leopards, as long as they met certain requirements.
But there were accidents. A little boy's arm
was chomped off by a lioness at a home in Knoxville.
A 3-foot alligator was found in the Holston
River. A 2-year-old girl
near Nashville
was killed by her father's leopard.
"Her head was crushed like a ripe
plum," then-state Sen. Ray Albright, of Chattanooga, told the Knoxville News Sentinel
in 1991. He sponsored the bill that tightened captive wildlife laws.
"You ought not have to live next door to
someone who has a wolf, a tiger, or a poisonous snake," Albright said.
When your next-door neighbor keeps beasts,
the worst can happen, as it did in Zanesville,
Ohio, in 2011. The small town
made global headlines after 50 exotic animals, including lions, tigers,
cougars, wolves and bears escaped from someone's personal zoo. The same
scenario could have been possible in Tennessee
before the 1991 law.
But law or no law, wildlife adoptions aren't
likely to stop. Lorane McCarty, who took in Buddy the deer and had raised
another deer and seven squirrels before that, said she would do the same thing
again.
"I know it's against the law, but, yes,
I would [take in another deer]," she said. "If somebody brought one
here half dead, I couldn't turn it away."
Morgan, who lost Dudley and Opossum, has put
her house in Delano
up for sale. She's been fed up with Polk
County and Tennessee for a while, and the killing of
her raccoons was the last straw.
She plans to move some place where she can
rescue and raise wild animals in peace.
"It was a great place to raise
kids," Morgan said. "But the TWRA has ruined it."
So far this year, Cook knows of only one
person the TWRA has caught keeping an illegal species.
But it's spring now, and baby animals will
start showing up. They may appear motherless, even if they aren't, Cook said.
And people won't be able to help themselves.
"That's why I refer to this time of year as
wildlife kidnapping season," Cook said.
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