Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles by Lynn Waddell Read Free Book Online

He’s posted more than seventy lengthy expletive-
    sno
    filled diatribes, a few with his talking mouth and bulging eyes morphed
    oz-
    onto the face of a baby. Yes, a grown man’s teeth in the mouth of a babe
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    saying Carole’s claims are “a big old thing of crawdad bullshit.”
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    Carole’s well aware that she has armies of enemies. The tires on
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    BCR’s vans have been slashed more than once; she’s asked security to
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    escort her out of FFWCC meetings. One refuge owner she targeted, a
    gan
    man from Seminole who rides around with his pet tiger in the back of
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    his pickup, regularly protests at her glitzy Fur Ball fund-raisers. Car-
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    ole says hostility peaked when she lobbied to require owners of the
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    twenty-four most dangerous exotics to get a ten-thousand-dollar
    surety bond. The bill was especially controversial because it also out-
    lawed pythons as pets. “People would come up screaming at me and
    threatening me, especially the snake people. They’re whack jobs.” Many
    of her detractors, naturally, make the same assessment of her.
    Invariably, their main criticism is that she’s a hypocrite. They point
    out that she has a sanctuary and that she and her late husband once
    bred and sold wild cats. They emphasize that many of the animals she
    claims that she “rescued” were once her pets. All true.
    Carole insists that was only the case in the 1990s, when she was
    married to Don Lewis, a man whose mysterious disappearance has also
    been juicy fodder for her foes. Wildman Joe Exotic even offers a ten-
    thousand-dollar reward for information about Don’s disappearance.
    I first met Carole in 1999 while writing a story for a local alterna-
    tive newspaper about her eccentric missing husband. A shapely woman
    with big, blue eyes, she met me in leopard print leggings and invited
    me into her small, hodgepodge home that also served as the sanctuary
    office. Her personal space was limited to a cluttered bedroom with a
    tiger print spread on a bed she had shared with a bobcat.
    Don made his millions dealing in tax-deed property and from sell-
    ing RVs and treasures he plucked from dumpsters. He was a trader to
    proof
    the core; everything was a commodity including, sometimes, their big
    cats. Carole says they didn’t set out to be big-cat owners. They went to
    an animal auction to buy llamas and were horrified to see a young bob-
    cat on a leash. They bought it, and Don loved it as his pet. Later at an
    auction in Minnesota, they bought fifty-six baby bobcats that she says
    were destined for a fur farm. “We bought them all to keep them from
    being killed,” she says. She admits they sold them as pets. “We didn’t
    know how stupid it was. We made an awful lot of mistakes over the
    years. The only people who could offer advice were the breeders.”
    They raised the cats on 40 acres down a dirt road in what was then
    a semi-rural area on the fringe of Tampa. They lived in a small, older
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    house surrounded by cat cages and called it Wildlife on Easy Street.
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    During those years, Carole says she awakened to the ugliness of the
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    exotic pet trade and the problems of keeping them as pets. (Finding a
    eg
    piece of raw meat in your bed can do that.) Like parents often do with
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    children, Carole and Don argued over their animals. She wanted bigger
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    cages; he argued they were fine. Don wanted to move the animals to
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    their property in Costa Rica; he wanted to keep them in Tampa.
    Then one day, Don vanished. Carole says he went to look at an ultra-
    light plane at a nearby airstrip and never returned. A sheriff’s investi-
    gation ensued. Searches were conducted. Carole was interviewed. One
    of Don’s children accused her of feeding him to the cats. Don’s long-
    time secretary insinuated the same, adding that Don was planning to
    divorce Carole. Without a body, the investigation hit a dead end. What
    happened to the cat man remains a mystery.
    Carole says that after Don’s