MOUNTAINBURG — Two more tigers that Betty Young has had for 18 years were moved Friday to a wildlife refuge near Eureka Springs.
“I hate to send any of them off, but I don’t really have a choice,” said Young, 72, whose ailing health has necessitated downsizing the population of big cats at her Riverglen Tiger Shelter on Locust Mountain near Mountainburg.
In early November, Riverglen had 34 large cats. As of Friday, the number was down to 21. Young wants to give away all of them except for about 10, which she considers a manageable number. The process will take months, she said.
Young has a bad hip and walks with a crutch. She said she hasn’t gotten a hip operation because she doesn’t know who would care for her cats while she recuperated.
“Hip surgery has a long recovery time,” she said. “Every time I go to town, somebody says, ‘What happened to your leg? One of those tigers get you?’”
Young has two part-time volunteers who help out at Riverglen.
Young said she’s so attached to her cats that she has slept with a 600-pound tiger in her house. The National Geographic television show Animal Intervention depicted her as an animal “hoarder” in a segment last fall, she said. Young said she’s not a hoarder; her operation is a nonprofit sanctuary.
As a nonprofit “wildlife sanctuary” under Arkansas Code Annotated 29-19-501(3)(a), Riverglen doesn’t have to follow federal or state regulations regarding animal cages. It’s up to the sheriff’s office to inspect the facility.
Crawford County Sheriff Ron Brown has said he has found nothing wrong with Riverglen’s facilities. The sheriff said his main concern is that something might happen to Young, and then he would become responsible for her tigers.
As of Friday, Young had given eight tigers and a cougar to Turpentine Creek near Eureka Springs. She gave two white tigers and two leopards to Cedar Cove Feline Conservatory and Education Center near Louisburg, Kan., about 20 miles south of Kansas City.
Bettie Jeanne “BJ” Auch, senior curator at Cedar Cove, said she can’t take any more of Riverglen’s big cats right now because she’s out of room and funding.
Turpentine Creek also ran out of room after adopting the first seven cats from Riverglen, but through a fundraising drive, it has raised $125,000 toward a goal of $238,000, said Scott Smith, vice president at Turpentine Creek.
That money is being used to build new fences and cages and to run utilities, such as water and electricity, to those cages, Smith said. As soon as new cages are ready, Turpentine Creek can move more big cats over from Riverglen.
Smith said it costs about $7,000 for each of Riverglen’s cats that the refuge adopts. That amount is just to get the cages ready, he said. It doesn’t pay for any feeding or other maintenance.
Turpentine Creek has 117 big cats, counting the two transported from Riverglen on Friday.
Smith said he planned to travel to Crawford County again over the weekend to pick up two more of Riverglen’s tigers.
On its Facebook page and website, turpentinecreek.org, Turpentine Creek refers to the operation as a “rescue” of the big cats at Riverglen.
The tigers moved Friday were a Bengal named Andrew and a Siberian named Tennille.
Turpentine Creek intended to take a tiger named Daisy on Friday, but she didn’t cooperate with Smith’s efforts to inject her with a tranquilizer in a syringe on the end of a long metal pole.
“Daisy wouldn’t show her rear, but Tennille did,” said Smith.
Tennille was sedated atop her den, which required that the 400-pound tiger be lowered to the ground before she could be carried to Turpentine Creek’s rescue trailer. That was accomplished using a blanket and carefully sliding her from the den roof.
When a reporter arrived at Riverglen on Friday morning, Daisy appeared agitated. Young asked the reporter to remove his baseball cap.
“They don’t like hats,” she said. “Or sunglasses. They can’t see your eyes.”
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 01/21/2013