Over the weekend, a roadside zoo in Hugo, Oklahoma, announced on Facebook that its owner and operator, Ryan Easley, had been killed by a tiger. Growler Pines Tiger Preserve’s post stated: “This tragedy is a painful reminder of both the beauty and unpredictability of the natural world.”
This is a tragedy that never should have happened. Our sympathy goes out to Easley’s loved ones who now grapple with the grief of loss.
What makes this death particularly tragic is that it was preventable. This death does not attest to the beauty and unpredictability of the natural world, but rather to the truth that so many members of the public now understand: Keeping wild animals in captivity and forcing them to perform for human amusement is as far from the natural world as they can get, and instrumentalizing animals for entertainment is dangerous and wrong for everyone involved.
Dozens of fatalities and injuries have been caused by captive wild animals used in traveling acts and circus-style performances. In 1997, a tiger killed trainer Wayne Franzen in front of 200 schoolchildren during a circus performance. Franzen’s son, Brian Franzen, continues to exhibit wild animals in circuses today. In 2010, an elephant attacked and killed a handler between performances at a Shrine circus.
Acts like these also endanger the public. In 2013, a woman came face to face with a tiger in a restroom after the animal escaped following a performance at a Shrine circus. In 2017, a tiger was spotted on an interstate, along a school bus route, and in a residential area where she was ultimately shot and killed by police after she attacked a dog in a backyard. The tiger had escaped during transport ahead of a planned shipment to Europe after performing for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for several years.
Before operating Growler Pines, Easley ran ShowMe Tigers, a circus act featuring tigers that traveled throughout the U.S. In 2017, one of our undercover investigators spent several weeks working and traveling with ShowMe Tigers and exposed the violent training involved in tiger acts.
Our investigation showed Easley’s eight tigers being forced to perform tricks for Carden Circus and Shrine circuses. Among other occurrences, our investigator recorded a practice session in which Easley whipped a tiger 31 times in less than two minutes because she refused to get off a pedestal. The investigator found that the tigers were kept in small, barren transport cages about half the size of a parking space. Here, they ate and slept, alongside their urine and feces.
Public records obtained by Humane World for Animals documented that Easley acquired young tigers from the better-known roadside zoo operators “Doc” Antle and Joseph Maldonado (“Joe Exotic”) featured in Tiger King. Easley also reportedly housed tigers at Maldonado’s facility during the circus off-season, as did other circus exhibitors. We know that Antle and Maldonado were both prolific tiger breeders who sold photo opportunities with big cat cubs. When the animals became too big to handle, they were treated as surplus and were often passed on to circus and roadside zoo proprietors, as well as private owners. This pipeline is a big part of why we advocated for more than a decade to ensure the passage of the Big Cat Public Safety Act in the U.S.
Before its passage, big cats were escaping from ramshackle facilities across the country. Since 1990, more than 400 dangerous incidents involving captive big cats have occurred in 46 states and the District of Columbia. Five children and 19 adults were killed before the passage of BCPSA, and hundreds of others have lost limbs or suffered other often traumatic injuries.
The BCPSA was signed into law in 2022 and came into full effect in 2023. The law prohibits physical contact between big cats and the public, and prohibits private owners of big cats from breeding, selling or acquiring any new big cats. Breeding big cats and removing cubs from their mothers at birth so they could be passed around for public photo ops and profit is now illegal. And the influx of discarded adolescent big cats—once they become too large to handle—has diminished.
Growler Pines Tiger Preserve wrote that Easley understood the risks of being around wild animals, but that he understood those risks, “not out of recklessness but out of love.” We as a society will have learned nothing if we do not acknowledge that this death was preventable and that it should remind operators of wild animal acts that exploiting animals for entertainment is dangerous, cruel and wrong—it is not love. We have seen this skewed idea of love before—whether it’s through our investigations, or in documentaries sweeping popular culture, such as Tiger King or Chimp Crazy—and every time it is heartbreaking to witness.
The only way to truly end the sad era in which wild animals are crammed into cages or forced to perform for human whimsy is to pledge never to the support these spectacles. We must all commit to doing everything we can to prevent such cruelty, danger and death in the future.
Sara Amundson is president of Humane World Action Fund.
