NEWSLINK: The tiger next door: America’s backyard big cats

It was the sort of headline impossible to scroll past: “Pot Smokers Find Caged Tiger in Abandoned Houston House, Weren’t Hallucinating: Police.” Last February, a group of people had snuck into a deserted house in Texas’s largest city to smoke marijuana when they stumbled upon a full-grown tiger in a cage – a cage secured by just a nylon strap and a screwdriver. Sergeant Jason Alderete of Houston Police Department’s animal cruelty unit, later told a local TV station: “It wasn’t the effects of the drugs. There was an actual tiger!” The animal was given a name, Loki, and sent to an animal sanctuary in the country, run by the Humane Society of the United States. You’d be forgiven for thinking Loki’s experience was an isolated incident – it isn’t.

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