Never Trust A Tiger

If you live in the Drew Hamilton Houses in Harlem, you learn to mind your own business. The run-down brick towers and surrounding streets are plagued with crime. Meddle in someone else's affairs and you never know what might happen. So when Valerie Tompkins opened her windows one day last summer and breathed in the foul stench of urine, she was not inclined to investigate. She knew that her upstairs neighbor, Antoine Yates, 37, kept exotic pets, but why ask for trouble? She just closed the window again. Darryl Carter, whose girlfriend lives down the hall from Yates, knew about the pets too. "He just loved animals," Carter told TIME last week. "He had a book full of pictures of the animals he owned. He had, like, alligators and snakes and pit bulls."

But Carter and most of Yates' other neighbors did not know about Ming. Even in a city in which residents pride themselves on taking things in stride, a 425-lb. tiger in a fifth-floor apartment is a bit much. "How the hell did he keep it around here so damn long?" wonders Theodore Dixon, another neighbor. "What if he'd opened the door and it ran out? There are kids in this building. It probably would have bit them." In the end, it was Yates who was bitten, and although he first claimed that he had been attacked by a pit bull, someone tipped the police off to the real story. A cop eventually rappelled down the outside of the building, shot the tiger with a tranquilizer dart and ended the crisis. "This," police commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters, "is an only-in-New-York story."

Except that it isn't. This month brought three tiger attacks in less than a week: on Yates; on Las Vegas showman Roy Horn, 59, who was mauled within an inch of his life before an audience of 1,500 at the Mirage hotel; and on Sarah Roy, 21, a trainer at the Keepers of the Wild animal sanctuary in Golden Valley, Ariz. While it might sound like a bizarre coincidence, the fact is that tiger attacks are not all that rare in the U.S. Between 1998 and 2001, according to a study by Philip Nyhus of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., there were no fewer than seven fatal tiger attacks and at least 20 more that required emergency care. Since 1999, two children--a girl, 10, and a boy, 3--have died in the jaws of pet tigers in Texas alone.

These numbers are not all that surprising, considering that there may be as many as 10,000 tigers in private hands in the U.S., many of them kept as pets. That is twice the estimated 5,000 or so left in the wild. In addition, Americans keep many thousands of other big cats, primarily lions and cougars. People own big cats for all sorts of reasons. Machismo is one: a tiger makes the nastiest Doberman seem like a yipping Chihuahua. Some people believe owning a tiger helps preserve an endangered species. And a tiger cub, at least, is downright adorable--until it grows up.