What, then, about the way that male tigers are usually neutered in sanctuaries, but male lions are not, because when neutered they lose their manes? Thompson seemed to need help, so Stilwell took up his Echo Weed Eater, and his lopper for the thicker growths, and his portable air compressor to pump up the flat tires of Thompson's Dually truck. Merry didn't know what was going on, so he stopped. Join Facebook to connect with Terry Thompson and others you may know. "I asked him what he was going to do when they turned the key on him," says Spires. His farm was reportedly raided June 2008 . "When he came back, they had been changed around in the cages. He'd already hung up his uniform and finished his dinner when, at around 5:20 p.m., he got the call reporting that Terry Thompson had an animal out. The solution was elegant, if unusual. He never left it.". Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories. [From a court deposition Thompson gave while incarcerated on March 28, 2011] Okay. As time passed, people got used to the way he might turn up at the local airfield, say, with a baby bear or lion. From $999 to buy. to my website where you will find interesting information and inspiration. Surely he must have broken every law that prevents your next-door neighbor from secretly housing an ambush of tigers? After the sheriff spoke with Hanna and talked him through what happened, he gave interview after interview. Unfortunately, one of the animals, a leopard-jaguar mix, was euthanized after he was severely injured from a cage door that fell on its neck. "He forgets where he came from," says one owner, Michael Stapleton (five tigers, four bears). Fast boats. If there is a line that divides the avid collector from the hoarder, at some point Thompson seems to have crossed it. It was his neighbour, Sam Kopchak, who first noticed that Terrys horses were unusually agitated. Still, Lutz said he wasn't busy and would drive over. ), Thompson flew regularly for a local millionaire, including a vintage World War IIera Stearman biplane, and also kept some of his own planes on the Kopchak Road propertyhe had the electric company move the power lines so that he could take off and land there. Thompson had only returned from his prison sentence three weeks before. There are plenty of colorful stories about his exploits. The craziest, most tangentially related rumor that I hear in Zanesville: Jack Hanna was supplying Charlie Sheen's tiger blood. View the profiles of people named Terry Thompson. ", "Terry, are you sick?" But what about declawing cats, something considered quite acceptable in parts of the exotic owners' world? There are no sane people that would live in those conditions.". We sent Chris Heath to Zanesville, Ohio, to find out where the wild things areand what the hell they're doing there. I'm going to put it that way. The animals were scooped by the bucketload, placed in the hole, and earth backhoed over them. What did he ever do to his country?" When he walked into a room, everyone stood up. Thompson did speak to other friends in those days. Due to the dangerous circumstances, the police spent nearly seven hours hunting the animals, and shot nearly all of them. All rights reserved. In this era there were also numerous complaints of loose animals. I wonder how I might bring up the dark moment that the exotic-animal owners think of as his great never mentioned dirty secret, but I don't need to. His death was part of a twenty-five-year plot to rid America of exotic animals. He had a complicated relationship with the law, and his neighbours. I invite you to click around the site right now and come back . Three were leopards, still in their cages. She had to be convinced that the survivors should be taken to the zoo for safekeeping. It was this ATF raid that also forced real scrutiny for the first time on his exotic animals. Terry William Thompson grew up just east of Zanesville on his parents' farm, close to the airport. You know, I'm crazy, but I live in the big house on the hill with the biggest horse and the fastest boat, fastest bike. An African lioness crawled under the livestock fence and ran south down the road then headed toward someone's home, so he shot her before she could go farther. Sep 12, 2009. Every human who interacts with an animal and then makes claims about what that interaction means to the animalin backyards or zoos or even on the plains of Africais making a claim neither they nor anyone else can verify. [7] In the years leading up to his death, he went to prison on federal gun charges, was heavily in debt, and his wife had left him. Usually he never hesitated. "Our role in life is to care for animals and to educate and inspire people about these great creatures," says Stalf, "and to see them piled in the mudit was just a bad day, you know.". What happened: 10 years ago today, exotic animal collector Terry Thompson set 50 animals loose before fatally shooting himself on his 73-acre farm west of Zanesville. These included a grizzly bear, three leopards and two monkeys all whom were then taken to the Columbus Zoo. The catastrophic incident that took place in Ohio should have served as a cautionary tale for others in America. Your neighbor could buy as many tigers, lions, cougars, and other exotic animals as he so desired and would be under no obligation to tell anyone. I don't know how else to explain it." Occasionally there were reports of more unusual creatures running free but nothing too bad had ever happened. Why do you need so many?' Spires says Thompson told him that he only pleaded guilty because otherwise they were also going to charge his wife as a co-owner of the property; Thompson told the judge that he pleaded guilty because he and his wife couldn't afford further legal fees. Apparently it worked. Not the weapon you'd want when you're facing down 350 pounds of charging bear. The road his and Thompson's properties abutted was named Kopchak Road after his great-uncle. He was charged with animal cruelty relating to some livestock he kept on his parents' old property on the other side of town after three cows and a buffalo were said to have died of starvation and was sentenced to six months' house arrest. Ad Choices, 18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars, 2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque, and 1 Man Dead in Ohio. He once told Spires about someone repeatedly breaking the windows of his shop and vandalizing the place, and how he'd waited for three nights to catch the culprit. The animal lovers are the ones that hurt them.' "Kind of classyyou know," says Jim Stilwell, a longtime friend of Thompson's who went to school with Sharp. The wounds mentioned in the autopsy report, aside from the gunshot wound, begin with "a 2 1/4 inch vertical laceration on the right lower forehead and along the spine of the nose." He lived in a hardback tentyou know, a wood frame and a wood floorand apparently a monkey kinda befriended him. His friends, and there do seem to be many of them, talk of Thompson with a deep devotion, and testify at length to his goodness, generosity, and freeness of spirit, though they concede that he was certainly no lover of authority, and would maybe even go out of his way to rub up against it. When the owners I meet with talk about the proposed new laws (which, in their most inflexible draft versions, would effectively close down everyone in Ohio whom I speak with, and so would inevitably lead to massive animal euthanization), there is one other common target of their ire, aside from Terry Thompson: Jack Hanna. Personal testimonies from his closest staff and family tell a different story from the daily public barrage of criticisms by of the media. I think he would say, 'That's just what I expect.' Maybe there's a letter or a note that explains it all. Likewise, there is wide disagreement about what kind of human intervention or interaction can be beneficial or justified. The first involves his daughter and cancer. Because I can.' Even if many of the animals were confused or scared, and not bloodthirsty for human flesh, some of the friendliest might have been expected to want to "play" with Thompsonand when a cat this big decides to play with you, you are in little less peril than when it decides to attack you. Without a USDA license, he wasn't allowed to supply animals for photo shoots and commercial events, though he sometimes got around it by using fellow owner Cindy Huntsman's animals and accreditation. "My animals were raised in a magnificent setting, creeks going through the place and everything was gorgeous. Terry Thompson was born in Belfast, he grew up on the Castlereagh Road in East Belfast. By Ryan Gajewski Staff Editor, Digital "I'm not gonna lie, it . An incredible true story from the March 2012 issue of GQ. Ten years ago, after a heart attack, Taft had a quintuple-bypass operation. When the 911 operator asked for her first name, Mrs. Kopchak answered "Dolores," the name on her birth certificate but one she never uses: "I've been called Dolly for eighty-four years. I hear different versions of what was being said: dead catsa white tiger and a cougarobserved lying on the property; animals getting loose; a 2-year-old lion being allowed to run around in the open; multiple animals in such bad health that they would have to be euthanized. I think that was a lot of it. "Every day gets tougher," the actor said ahead of the release of 'Still: A Michael J. Most seem to have stumbled into it, impulsively buying a bear or lion cub without thinking through how, as one puts it, "a year from now, it's not going to be so cuddly." It was all about Terry after that. Thompson opened a bike shop in town. The white tiger had gone. People insist that the Terry Thompson they knew was too lazy to go to that kind of trouble. "Fast motorcycles. I think he had a little touch of Agent Orange. Instead, he walked over to Walmart, bought a Schwinn cruiser bicycle and rode nearly fifty miles through the rainy night along the old Route 40 until he reached his home. Only when the shape broke out of the circle could Kopchak see that it was a black bear. He just couldn't keep his brain on the right track. In the later years it became very overwhelming because Terry went a little off the deep end. Soon, their collection grew into a private mini zoo as the couple took care of rescued animals, and also bought some themselves. He told Spires that he was broke, that all he had was sixty horses, but Spires reassured him that he'd made money before and he could make money again. Some owners took food down to Thompson's property themselves, some say they contacted the sheriff's department. I'm telling you, the lion is bad enough, and the lioness is bad enough, and the wolf is bad, and the bear, butdon't be around the tiger.
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