(Washington) US President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed a law banning private shows of big cats and other petting sessions of baby tigers, as shown in the hit television series Tiger King.
The “Big Cat Public Safety Act” aims to limit “the breeding and possession of certain big cats”, said the White House.
This concerns lions, tigers, leopards and other jaguars, which in the future can only be kept in captivity in approved zoos, reserves or universities.
It will also be forbidden to put these animals in direct contact with the public.
Individuals who already own one or more big cats will have to declare them, and they will be prohibited from breeding, selling or acquiring new ones.
The text de facto sounds the death knell for private zoos run by individuals and which offered, for example, to pose with a baby tiger or a lion cub in your arms.
A practice denounced for years by animal protection associations, who accuse these owners of having pushed their wild animals to reproduction, to get rid of the animals once they have become less photogenic and docile, and too expensive to maintain.
The association PETA judged that from now on, it would no longer be possible to “get rich thanks to the suffering of feline babies torn from their mothers in cages”.
Brittany Michelson, of the association In Defense of Animals, also welcomed this legislative initiative: “There will be no more big cats drugged, moved and used as props for photo shoots. »
Law benefited from the momentum of the hit Netflix series Tiger Kinga documentary devoted to the unscrupulous owner of a private menagerie of felines, confronted with an activist managing a “sanctuary” for these same animals.
The latter, Carole Baskin, welcomed on Facebook the promulgation of the text, for which she actively campaigned: “This will rapidly decrease the number of big cats who are born to lead lives of deprivation and captivity”.