I touched lions and dinosaur eggs. Now what?

I’m not a PETA member or an animal rights activist per se. Maybe it’s time I step up to the plate. I do love animals and cuddling fluffy puppies...or baby tigers as the opportunity arises. I’m a vegetarian primarily for health reasons but of course, support and appreciate fair treatment for all animals.  While there are so many issues worth fighting for in regards to the rights and dignities of humans, the way we treat our animals is also a sign of how we treat each other. Thank you, Upton Sinclair, Howard Lyman, Julia Butterfly Hill and countless others for pointing out the sick relationship we have had and continue to have both biologically and mentally with our eco-systems. I try to avoid soapboxes on my blog but I thought about all of these issues rather intensely this past weekend.

I wrote to my sister when I safely got back into Oaxaca last weekend... “I went with my Swiss classmate to visit this really wealthy man's house and spent the night in his mansion. He owns a private zoo. It was the strangest past 24 hours of my life. One for the book.” My sister has suggested I write a book.

So here's the story before I adapt it to the book:
My friend from language school was invited by this wealthy Mexican man to visit his home. They met on a weekend excursion to see ruins outside of town the weekend before. Red flag! Where have I seen this before? Right, the other stranger's house in Mexico. Read here: http://heartjean.blogspot.com/2011_09_01_archive.html
  My Swiss friend was willing to go if I would join her. It wouldn't be so strange if there were two of us going, would it? I've done far riskier things. We decided to accept his invitation to stay at his home for one night. I think we had an exit strategy...like, if it was really awful we could always stay at a hotel or something.
We took a 3 hour bus to the town Tehuacan in the state of Puebla. Our new "friend" picked us up at the bus station in a fancy car with his niece and nephew riding along. Nope, nothing strange here. A few minutes later we arrive at a large gated home.
As the gates opened to his driveway, a bullet-proof-vest-wearing-guard shooed the scores of chihuahuas out of the way of our car pulling in. The wealthy man sells chihuahuas on the side. Good business, he says.

We entered the house filled wall-to-wall with taxidermy-- (I was assured all animals died of natural causes on his property). While the wealthy man and his nephew attended to some business at the dining room table, the niece brought out a baby leopard for us ladies to cuddle. At this point, I have no idea where this animal came from. The nephew and wealthy man were still talking about something at the table so the niece started opening cabinets and showing us fossils, dinosaur eggs, pre-hispanic-mesoamerican artifacts. We passed them around like we were shopping for a good centerpiece at The Pottery Barn.
The wealthy man found us in his office a while later fondling artifacts thousands of years old and posing with stone tablets with mysterious inscriptions. The occasional flamingo could be seen sauntering past the office window in the backyard. The wealthy man openly admitted he bought his pieces on the black market. He wanted to start a museum one day. Fascinating, right?
Well, as you can imagine, we had many questions! Number 1: Why did he invite us strangers to his home? His round-about answer suggested that he enjoyed sharing what he had and that he trusted foreigners in his home far more than his fellow Mexicans. Hmmm. After leaving our things in guest bedrooms, we went for a ride to the local shopping mall for sandwiches with the wealthy man and his niece. You're right, this isn't in the guidebooks.

Nighttime had fallen on the house of enchanted black market treasures...so what to do?---- That's right!...say goodnight to all the exotic animals in the backyard! So off we went out the back door of the house: myself, my Swiss friend, the niece with a baby tiger on a leash, the nephew and two guards following behind walking with flashlights.  We followed closely behind as the wealthy man clanged on the cages with his flashlight and cooed at his cats.  By cats I mean, lions and tigers...and bears and zebras and monkeys suddenly emerging out of the darkness!  The feeling of walking down a pitch black pathway and then realizing you are within inches of a white tiger's face is a sensation to remember.

My Swiss friend and I later retired to guest bedrooms to quietly whisper our private reactions to these strange environs. "Um, why are we here again?" "Was that really a dinosaur egg?" "Does it matter?" "How many foreigners are buried in the backyard?" "Just kidding, haha!" "I think I walked through monkey sh!t...or was that from the chihuahuas?" "How does the wealthy man have money again?" "Look at the pretty marble floors in the bathroom." "He was married to how many European women?" "Which Mexican political party's campaign did he support again?" "Is that his nephew or a cousin? Are you sure that's his niece? No, I heard niece." "What kind of laws are there for having tigers in your backyard in Mexico?" "Is this what you imagined when you met him last week?"

The next morning I couldn't eat the cow intestine soup served for breakfast but my Swiss friend said it had interesting texture. I had quesadillas and we sat surrounded by jade skulls and arrowheads discussing what mountains the wealthy man had climbed and how much he likes Russia. It was a largely male dominated conversation with the nephew and wealthy man at the heads of the tables with us four girls quietly chewing our breakfast, speaking in rapid Spanish and using sprinklings of choppy English. Soon thereafter we went to see all the animals in the private zoo in their full daytime glory. The wealthy man often opened the metal doors so we could take unobstructed photos of the amazing creatures.

The wealthy man says that his cats have a huge rate of reproduction. More "mainstream" zoos don't understand how he does it with such a small space. He says it's because he loves them and the animals have fun looking at each other. At one point, I tried to tactfully ask about how he learned to take care of so many animals and if he has a lot of legal obstacles. His short answer was that he just started reading about animals over time and that he has to keep microchips in all of his animals so that they are accounted for by the government. 
So what to do with that information? Well, in that moment, you can only feed marshmallows to 7 foot grizzly bears and pet the fine silky black coats of jaguars. We had our choice of the stuffed ones inside or the live ones in the cages.
After  hours of being up close and personal with dozens of species in the wealthy man's zoo, we went for lunch in town and were dropped off at the bus station...without a scratch.

He was a nice enough man but I was ready to scratch under the surface a bit more. Luckily, others have scratched here before questioning whether these animals should be confined as they are. There have been petitions to move the animals to a better habitat. There is also a short film investigating its ethics as well. I'm not sure what to do next. But writing about it is a start.