“It’s just a free-for-all in Ohio, and Sam Mazzola is just an example of that,’’ said Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States. “Tigers, wolves, bears in a suburban Lorain County community: It is a disaster waiting to happen.’’
The death in Ohio and attacks elsewhere — including the maiming of a Connecticut woman by her friend’s pet chimpanzee and a 2-year-old Florida girl squeezed to death by her family’s python — highlight the holes in the patchwork of federal, state, and local laws on keeping dangerous wild animals at home.
Mazzola had the proper state permit to keep the black bear.
He also kept wolves, tigers, and a lion, something he was free to do because Ohio and at least four other states — Alabama, Idaho, Missouri, and Montana — impose few or no restrictions on the ownership of non-native animals kept solely as pets, according to a review of state regulations by the Associated Press.
The US Department of Agriculture regulates animals exhibited to the public but not private ownership. The US Fish and Wildlife Service requires permits for native endangered and threatened species but doesn’t normally track non-native, endangered species unless they are bought and sold across state borders.
The Humane Society cut a deal this year with Ohio Governor Ted Strickland and leading farm groups that traded pulling an animal cruelty measure off the November ballot for certain animal protections, including a ban on exotic pets. Farm groups opposed the ballot measure, which would have imposed treatment and caging requirements on livestock, as threatening to Ohio’s $93 billion agricultural industry.
Under the original version of the proposed Ohio regulations, owners could have kept existing dangerous pets like Mazzola’s but not have been able to breed them or replace them when they died.
But Strickland has now ordered that the new rules allow the state to pull animals away from owners who have engaged in misconduct, such as losing their federal license, spokeswoman Amanda Wurst said. The rules will not ban exotic animals from zoos, research centers, and existing athletic mascot programs, she said.
