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Tiger Found In Harlem Apt.
By Wil Cruz and Jeremy Olshan

October 4, 2003, 8:58 PM EDT


A Bengal tiger being kept as a pet in a fifth-floor Harlem apartment was tranquilized and carted away by police Saturday night after a daring descent down the side of the building by cops with sedation darts and a machine gun.

The wild beast did not go quietly. The crowd of several hundred on the street below, which had been transfixed during the hours-long drama, heard a loud roar as the dart hit its mark.

[...]

Police were still searching for Antoine Yates, 36, whom they identified as the man keeping the tiger and a three-foot caiman, a type of crocodile, in the public housing apartment. They were tipped off to the illegal menagerie after Yates was taken to the hospital Wednesday to be treated for animal bites.

Yates told the doctor he had been bitten on his right arm and leg by his pit bull, but the doctors, after examining both fresh and old wounds, were suspicious. Police said they also received an anonymous call about wild animals biting people at Yates' address.

[...]

The golden brown, striped, 6-foot-long tiger, which experts say could easily kill or maim a human, was taken to the Bronx Zoo, where it will stay temporarily before being moved, perhaps to a facility in Ohio, police said. It is healthy and in good condition, officials said.

[...]

"He got the tiger when it was very little some three to five years ago," said a neighbor who would identify himself only as Moe. "That was his pet. It just outgrew him."

An estimated 7,000 tigers are kept privately worldwide, purchased for thousands of dollars on the black market, according to James Doherty, general curator of the Bronx Zoo. "That's well more than all the wild tigers in all of Asia," he said.

Since 1990 at least eight people have been killed by tigers, and more than 60 adults and children have been injured, Doherty said. "They can be tamed, as Sigfried and Roy had done up until night, but I can think of nothing more dangerous or more inhumane than keeping a wild tiger as a pet."