Search Exotic Incidents Database

An Illinois family discovered a ring-tailed lemur in their garage when investigating strange noises coming from that area. It is illegal to own a lemur in Illinois, as lemurs are on the state’s list of Endangered and otherwise protected species. After the family found the lemur, they notified the Illinois Conservation Police, who then reached out to the Miller Park Zoo for assistance, where the animal was later re-homed.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, police say they’ve located a tiger while investigating a shooting. Officers allegedly followed a trail of blood to a trailer, where they expected to find a person who had been injured. Instead, they found a Bengal tiger cub in a dog crate. Officials could not confirm where the tiger cub came from.

The cub was taken to the ABQ BioPark Zoo. According to the New Mexico Game and Fish spokesperson, there have been a substantial increase in inquiries of how to possess wild animals as pets, which may have a connection to the glamorized portrayal of these animals in popular media.

A man staying at a Denver-area Best Western hotel found a snake crawling out of the toilet in his room. “I walked past the bathroom and… there was a snake coming out of the toilet,” the man stated. “It was about a foot out of the toilet when I [saw] it, and the toilet was closed and it was still trying to come up on out of it.”

Local police arrived at the scene and removed the snake. The increasingly frequent abandonment of pet exotic animals is likely to blame for this hotel room scare. The previous owner of the snake presumably dumped the snake at the hotel and left.

A coati was just confiscated from a man’s porch in San Antonio, Texas.

The man called Animal Control when he saw the animal “clinging to the pillar of his porch entryway looking back at him.” Animal Control confiscated the wild, non-native animal, whose natural range includes parts of Central and South America. The animal was then transferred to the Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation, Inc.

A woman in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was found guilty on one count of “unlawfully introduce/stock wild animals” after allegedly releasing a captive pet bobcat in Green Lake County in 2021.

The woman is the owner of Premier Exotics, a business licensed with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as an animal dealer that uses the address of a residential home in Milwaukee. A social media page for the business indicates that she breeds and sells various exotic cats, including servals and caracals.

Documents from the DNR indicate that she obtained the bobcat kitten without proper state permits and kept the bobcat inside her Milwaukee home.

Four animals at the Spring River Zoo in Roswell, New Mexico, were attacked and killed by a pack of dogs. Three Barbary sheep (also known as aoudads) and one wallaby were killed.

The dogs presumably entered the zoo enclosure by digging underneath the perimeter fence. The attack could have caused the other zoo animals to experience heightened anxiety and stress by witnessing it.

At the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens in Florida, a 5-year-old North American black bear named Johnny that escaped an exhibit “behind the scenes” and subsequently “engaged” with a zookeeper was shot dead by the zoo’s lethal weapons team. The keeper was hospitalized with multiple injuries and the zoo would not elaborate on details of the encounter. According to Kelly Rouillard, the zoo Director of Marketing, using a tranquilizer would not have been effective, and the priority was saving the human life.

Several other serious incidents have occurred at this zoo prior to Johnny.

A 10-year-old male Cuban crocodile at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo has died from a presumed electrical injury sustained in his indoor habitat.

Staff discovered the deceased crocodile the morning of December 17^th. The evening before, they had conducted a routine exhibit-integrity inspection at closing, concluding that nothing was wrong with the enclosure.

Staff deduced the crocodile was attracted to a replacement electrical outlet and attacked the electric infrastructure in the habitat, despite the new outlet being positioned higher than the original outlet. Known for their aggressive behavior, the crocodile pulled the electric equipment off the wall and bit various pieces.

He had been living in this habitat without incident for several years, and the exhibit passed an accreditation inspection by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums in 2018.

USDA finds critical and repeated violations at the Wild Florida Drive-Thru Safari Park following a fatal rhino shooting.

In Osceola County, Florida, weeks after an escaped rhino was shot and killed by staff members, an inspection has found that Wild Florida was non-compliant under the federal Animal Welfare Act.

After first arriving at the facility, the rhino was reportedly calm, but increasingly began attempting to escape the enclosure. According to body camera footage recorded by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Wild Florida’s General Manager explained that he and his staff chased the and shot at the animal after breaking through the enclosure.

At the John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a penguin named Picchu is recovering from surgery after swallowing a dime that was apparently tossed into his enclosure.

Officials said Picchu likely mistook the coin for the shiny appearance of a fish, a main component of a penguin’s diet. The zoo’s veterinary team used endoscopy equipment to remove the dime.