Actress
Hopes New Year Brings New Law to Protect Animals
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Continued...
Hedren emphasized that the preserve, which houses nearly 60 animals — including
lions, tigers, leopards, cougars, servals and elephants — is not
to be confused with a zoo.
“We’re not open to the public, only on a reservation basis,” Hedren
said. “The Shambala Preserve is for the animals. When an animal comes
here for the first time, their best interest is what we do here. If it’s
a lion, we make sure and put them with another lion.”
And, more importantly, not with a suburban family. Hedren is staunchly opposed
to the sale of wild animals as pets, and uses her celebrity status to help
fight the practice.
“Many people are sold this bill of goods. For years, I thought, ‘Why
aren’t there laws across the United States to prevent this?’” she
said. “Some of the animals brought to us [at the preserve] were in
deplorable shape. They were living in basements, being sold out of cars
in parking lots,
it was an awful situation.”
This prompted Hedren to co-author a bill to prevent the sale of wild animals
as domestic pets and present it to Congress. Hedren said Rep. Larry Combest,
a Texas Republican who retired last year, used his position as chairman
of the House Agriculture Committee to block an early version of the bill “because ‘it
wasn’t good for Texas.’”
In Texas, Hedren said, some breeders provide exotic animals for “canned
hunts” — events where participants pay a fee for a hunt that
provides a guaranteed trophy.
“The fee is anywhere from $3,000 to $30,000. There are more canned hunts
in Texas and all through the Midwest,” Hedren said. “They’ll
drug the animals, put them on chains, put them in an area where they can’t
get away. It is a guaranteed trophy.
“And there are no laws to safeguard these poor animals which are sold for
commercial purposes,” she continued. “The breeders don’t
care as long as they get that money.”
Canned hunts are the next target of the Shambala Preserve and the Roar Foundation,
the actress said.
Hedren, who said the exotic pet trade is the third most profitable illicit
trade behind illegal drugs and weapons, also worries about people getting
killed or
injured by wild animals kept as pets.
“A little 4-year-old boy was killed,” she said. “Another one
had his arm removed. A little 11-year-old girl was killed when her stepfather
brought her into the tiger’s cage to groom the tiger. … People are
being hurt and killed by these animals. They’re not pets, they’re
predators.”
Hedren’s interest in animals began in 1969 while filming “Satan’s
Harvest” in Africa.
“I’ve been working with big cats for over 30 years. First, in order
to do a movie about the animals in the wild and the problems they have just due
to encroaching civilization, sport hunting and poaching,” Hedren said. “When
we made that movie, my whole family got hurt. I got hurt, my ex-husband was hurt,
our director of photography was hurt. They’re not pets, and I’m
a walking example of the fact.”
Hedren said the producers of “Satan’s Harvest” had seen an
abandoned house in Mozambique that was taken over by a pride of lions, “and
that’s what gave us the idea to use the big cats for our movie stars.”
“There must have been 28 [or] 29 big cats living in this house,” she
recalled. “Sitting in windows, going in and out the doors. It was
an awesome sight to see.”
Back in California, Hedren and the film crew began looking for trained lions
to fill the roles.
“When the trainers read the script and read that we’d have all of
these cats working together, they just laughed at us and said it couldn’t
be done because their instincts to fight would be intensified,” she recalled. “They
suggested that we acquire animals to do the movie, introduce them slowly — a
romantic notion.
“The first one was a rescue,” she continued. “From then on
down, we were accepting big cats that were maybe from animal parks that
went under, circus animals, excess zoo animals. The common denominator was the
private
citizens who had their heads filled with smoke and [had been] told these
cats would make a good pet. We never thought of them as pets.”
As she begins a new year of work at the preserve, Hedren hopes the president
will sign the Captive Wildlife Safety Act, and that further changes in the
law will be considered.
“I’m just so anxious for this bill to get passed,” she said. “People
ask me what my goal is for the Shambala Preserve, and I tell them it’s
so that someday, we won’t need sanctuaries for pet tigers and lions. That
someday, they won’t be so easily sold — and that people will
get smarter.”
For
information about the Shambala Preserve and the Roar Foundation, visit
the
Web site www.shambala.org.
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