Tiger Wayne strip club tigers are playful feline cubs typically 30-40 pounds. I get to shoot the pictures.  Jack Corbett

Just to watch a tiger running or at play is enough to make the heart pound. But to play with a tiger while the cameras on you is one of those rare opportunities dreams are made of. I have been one of the fortunate few who gets to take pictures of some of the most beautiful women in the world with the most captivating and photogenic animals on the planet, which all started that night they started holding the first S.P.E.W. wrestling matches over at Big Daddy's Cabaret in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. At the nude wrestling matches I met Tiger Wayne for the first time, a man who has access to over 150 big cats... tigers, leopards, lions, pumas, jaguars, and cheetahs among them. Counting himself as one of the most fortunate men on the planet for being working with these beautiful, dangerous predators, Tiger Wayne earned his reputation for daring to do things with “his animals” other animal trainers are either too timid or sane to try. Why? Let's talk to him.

Jack Corbett: I’ve noticed, Wayne, that the girls who've modeled with your tigers seems to like them better than dogs, or house cats, or just about anything. What's up?

Tiger Wayne: “The whole world is fascinated by tigers to start with. It’s not just girls... guys like them too. When I pull up to a gas station with that 40 foot animal trailer of mine with the open strip sides I’ll have 10 people immediately nudging up to take a look. By the time I've filled up, over 100 to 150 people are encircling the trailer. Cell phones, you know.”

Jack: “Okay, I’m fascinated by tigers. So, what’s the reason? Why are people so fascinated by tigers?

Wayne: “First off it’s because they're wild, mysterious, and dangerous. Think about this animal that has the power to take down a water buffalo. I mean, this animal can kill just about anything that lives. They're the finest killing machine on earth. They're lungs are a problem though. The lungs are good for only about 100 yards of hard going.

Jack: “Only about one hundred yards?”

Wayne: “That’s about it.”

Jack: “Is the same thing true about a lion, for example?

Wayne: “Lions do much better because they operate like a military unit... they form a circle around their game. And then they close in. So they do quite well, and that’s why lions are not on the endangered list like all the other cats.

Jack: “Because they are organized?”

Wayne: “Because of the family unit. The other thing a Tiger has babies. First off, big cats keep their babies with them for over two years. Tiger's are solitary. Not that they want to be. Because it’s the only way that they can eat. It takes so much area for them to be able to feed themselves. So they have to live a solitary lifestyle. So when Mom goes off to hunt, which can take all day, there’s no one left to protect these babies. And there’s plenty of predators who want to eat those tiger babies.”

Jack: “Such as?”

Wayne: “Hyenas mostly. Hyenas are also the dreaded enemies of leopards... they can fight off one hyena, but hyenas operate in packs so the leopard once he makes his kill climbs a tree and drapes his kill over a tree limb, eats his fill, then go about his business for a few days then go back to eat again. When these animals make a kill, they eat on that kill until their tongues which you’ve felt are extremely porous. And those tongues wipe the bone clean. Big cats are the true conservators of the earth.”

Jack: “Hey, how fast are these animals–like a lion or a tiger? ”

Wayne: “Lions and tigers can get to about 20mph., possibly 25 mph., and leopards can get up to about 35 mph. Then there’s the cheetah which tops out at 65 mph.. That’s the fastest mammal on earth.”

Jack: “And what about the prey of the Lion or Tiger? When the cat is at about it’s maximum speed of up to twenty-five miles an hour I might be able to outrun it with my bicycle.”

Wayne: “If you ever watch your housecat, and that’s how you see a lion or tiger makes up for its lack of speed. Because of their stealth. They creep forward. You ever watch a house cat stalking a mouse? They stalk until they know that they are in range, and then they pounce. Lions and tigers are the same.

Jack: “How did you get started in this business?”

Wayne: “I was down in Waco, Texas at a fair and people kept coming by my displays and saying: “Where are the tigers?” I asked myself...”Tigers? So, I had to find out. “

Jack: “How many years ago was that?”

Wayne: “It will be thirteen years this October. I found Jay in his booth where he had a little spot with a small cage and three tigers in there playing. He had a sign up that he was trying to support his cat farm.”

“Jack: “Where was the cat farm?”

Wayne: “It was in Bridgeport, Texas. He had like twenty-five cats. He was trying to raise the amount of meat he needed which was about 5,000 pounds a week. He was selling pictures. I walked up to him and said, “that’s really neat. Can I get in there and play with them?” Praying is something you don’t do with cats, but I didn’t know it and Jay had nothing to lose. He was eating road kill as it was. You know he’d get a road kill and cut the back strap off of it for him and his wife and he’d feed the rest to his cats. When you are in this business you give everything you’ve got to your animals and you take what’s left over. So he said, “Yeah, go ahead. I went in there and the first one jumped me, then the second once jumped me, And they were bouncing all over me, and I had a ball. And when I walked out of there I was in love for life.”

Jack: “They were jumping all over you? Just playing with you?”

Wayne: “Oh yeah. You see, those cats had no rules in the cage. Now, my cats have rules in the cage. They can never jump on a human. Because I like going in with them when they are adults too.”

Jack: “So they were just jumping on you? They were not clawing on you?”

Wayne: “No! They were playing.!!” They were wrasslin'.”

Jack: “There were three of them and how large were they?”

Wayne: “They were about 100 pounds each. About twice the size of what Max is.”

Jack: “What were you doing in the fair in the first place?”

Wayne: “I had all my retail stuff.”

Jack: “Such as?”

Wayne: “Well, we had all our family stuff such as personality computers. You know anywhere you go to a fair in the United States, you see those personality computers?”

Jack: “Oh.....(as it dawns on me)—You were doing that?”

Wayne: “Actually I wasn’t doing anything. The local girls were working the booths and I was setting up the displays and collected the money. I would promote acts and get commissions and I was making over $100,000 a year. And I was happy, I thought. Until I ran into Jay’s cats. And he needed help so I said, “Why are you paying rent? There was a circus there in the fair. People didn’t give a damn where the circus was. They wanted to know where the tigers were. So I told Jay, “You are the most popular thing in the fairgrounds so why in the hell would you pay them rent? So I started booking him places as a feature... no more rent.. Then I saw how many cats he had so I said to him, “why don’t you put a show together?” And he asked: “What do you mean?” So I told him with all the knowledge you’ve got, why don’t you go to the fairs and bring more than just these photo cats, Bring ten cats with you (because he had everything. All kinds.) So bring these cats with you and talk to the people. Pick up a mic and tell these people about these animals. Educate them. Tell them all this stuff you’ve been telling me. So he asked: “Why should I do that?” So I said to him: “Because if you do that I can call it a show and I can get fairs to pay you.” So four months later I had him his first gig at Lake Charles Louisiana Contraband Days for an eleven day spot which paid him eleven thousand or a grand a day.

Well I had told him, you put together a show and these people will pay your just for showing up with your animals as the attraction. I mean, they pay for racing pigs– and this guy’s got white tigers, black panthers, snow leopards and he was paying them. Well we fixed that.

Jack: “So you were starting to get these bookings for him?”

Wayne: “Yes. And then I’d be here and he’d be somewhere else so eventually I’d just start taking off saying to myself–“To hell with it. My employees can take care of things while I’m gone.” So I’d drive four hundred miles to be where the cats were. I just couldn’t stay away from them. No matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t stay away from them.”

Jack: “Why?”

Wayne: “That first time. I just got this little scar on my stomach still where I cut myself on one of their teeth.”

Jack: “How did you cut yourself on their teeth?”

Wayne: “One jumped up on my back and when I turned to him another one was jumping on my front. Well they play with their mouths open. So when I turned I rubbed my stomach across his tooth. They weren’t biting down I mean. And I didn’t know anything. I just knew there were three tigers and I was just fascinated. I mean I started doing such crazy things with them that just before a year after I had met Jay, they were calling me, Tiger Wayne. That’s because I do things that other people in the industry say are going to get you killed.”

Jack: “So you are still involved with Jay, right?”

Wayne: “Yes. Very much so. I mean he owns this ride that I’m operating. I mean when I said he used to eat road kill, nowadays he just bought this ride for cash for 400 grand.” But it’s still the rides that are supporting the cats for he’s now up to 115 cats.”

Jack: “Okay.....I had a couple of questions for you and one you have just partially answered. One is what do you do and what places do you show your cats and the other is, what exactly is a cat farm?”

Wayne: “A farm is–well it’s a term we mostly use with each other. To the public or practically anybody else, they are actually refuges where the animals live for their entire life. It’s a rescue center.”

Jack: “Are these places essentially for animals that have been raised by people as pets after which these people realize they cannot handle them?”

Wayne: “Like Max.”

Jack: “Who couldn’t handle Max?”

Wayne: “These people were living between Joplin (Missouri) and Springfield, and they got him and then they had a grand child, but they declawed the poor little guy, but it’s a good declaw job so he probably won’t be hindered by it when he grows up, but they thought they could make a pet out of him, but when you wrestle with them on the floor just like you would a puppy dog, when it’s just a little ball of fur with no teeth and no claws, he can’t hurt you. But anything you do with a cat becomes learned behavior, so now you have taught this animal how to play. In the wild when they are when they are playing they are learning all the skills they need to hunt and kill. So play is how they learn their killing skills. They don’t know what they are learning. Mom doesn’t take them with her until they are nine, ten or eleven months old. So they are just batting each other with claws and biting and they are learning how their body parts work. And then the first time they watch mother hunt it’s–“Oh, that’s what you do with these. So when a human gets one, and plays with him and lets him play back, the humans are honing his skills on how to kill them.”

Jack: “On how to kill them, his masters?”

Wayne: “Exactly. You see with mine I love them, I kiss them, I’ll lay down with them, and I’ll let them get on top of me but I’ll never let them get a play motion with me. They are just like a child. You know how when you play with a child it starts to play harder and harder and harder, well he’s going to keep going at it harder, You hug them, you nourish them, you love them, you feed them. I mean I’m the only fool in the world who walks in a cage with six large tigers holding six turkey drum sticks in front of him. Every professional in the industry says you can’t do it but I do it all the time. Every animal I’ve got feeds from my hand.”

Jack: “So this cat that I’ve played with and we are talking about, Max, when he was around fifty pounds, the owners start to recognize that he is becoming dangerous and they want to give him up to you?”

Wayne: “No. He’s only about seven or eight weeks old when the teeth start coming in nd he starts bleeding like a sieve everytime he grabs something. So they call, “Help. Somebody take this off our hands."

Jack: “How many cat farms are there that you are associated with?”

Wayne: “I work with a half a dozen. In Texas there is—well no one really knows. But the legitimate ones that have licences, there’s over 200 of them.

Jack: “In the U.S.?

Wayne: “No. In Texas. In the United States, probably a couple of thousand. There are more tigers in Texas than in all of the wild combined.”

Jack: “How many tigers would you say there are in the state of Texas?”

Wayne: “I’d say between 5 and 8 thousand.”

Jack: “So although there are a few people killed a year, that’s not that many compared to the total cats in captivity.’

Wayne: “There’s only about one in every third year killed. The death rate is extremely low”

Jack: “How about people who are scalped or their arms are cut off? Things like that.”

Wayne: “That type of injury is a little more common. If you look at your history of injuries it’s usually general public injury from wild cats and at one point when people were fighting U.S.D.A., they went to a court hearing and they got the stats. In the ten years prior to that date, there had been one hundred and twenty citizens injured by big cats. Two of them died. Now that’s citizens. We are not talking trainers. In the same ten years there had been a hundred-thousand people injured in attacks by dogs and over 250 had died. So the relationship is two dead to two hundred and fifty dead. The dogs are a lot more dangerous. Even though there are a lot more of them, they kill just as easily. And people are training their dogs to kill. People don’t train their tigers to kill. It is the stupid private owners where most of those accidents come from. They are training their tigers to kill—they don’t know it.”

Jack: “You show your cats at county fairs and I know also that you show them at clubs.”

Wayne: “At country fairs, and state fairs and sport shows and boat shows. Different kinds of meetings. Microsoft wanted us to do their annual three day picnic but it was in August when we are doing state fairs. So were unable to do it which I thought it would have been cool because if Bill Gates had been there and liked us, he could have given me the money to really take care of the animals.”

Jack: “You’ve already answered the question about how many cats are being kept in captivity in the United States. Okay, online, there are a number of web sites that are saying this is tragic that people think they can keep big cats for pets. Do you think that it's a mistake for people to keep them as pets.“

Wayne: “Absolutely, positively, definitely they are not pets. We adopt them from the pet industry. But you have to understand that every time we take a cat in from the pet industry we're committing to feeding that cat 100,000 pounds of meat in it's lifetime. That's a big investment.”

Jack: “And that is going to cost how much?”

Wayne: “If they were using the cheapest meat you can buy... $100,000 at least. “

Jack: “Somewhere I’ve read somewhere that you have to have a certain type of enclosure with concrete footings...“

Wayne: “To build a compound for it, a humane compound for it, is a bare minimum of thirty thousand dollars. “

Jack: “Okay, and how large would this be?”

Wayne: “That would be a minimum of forty by fifty. That’s for a big cat who’s a very lazy animal. He has to have a perch. He has to have a place where he likes to go to the bathroom. He has to have a place to live. He has to have a house. In the case of Jaguars, they have to have a pool where they can get into because they love the water. And they have to have their specific toys and the things that they enjoy. In the case of leopards and bears you want to have a tree in there because they love to climb. You want to give them the things that they like in life. A lot of places like us give them far superior places to life in the wild. A lot of them are slimy garbage that are raising them to sell to the Chinese for the pharmaceutical trade because they are offering over $200 a pound for tiger bones. Because they can’t get them out of the wild anymore because they are practically extinct and they can’t find them anymore.”

Jack: “How many cats are there in the wild right now? There’s very few Siberian tigers I’d guess.”

Wayne: “There’s about one hundred and fifty Siberians, there’s probably around a thousand to twelve hundred Indo-Chinese, there’s probably between 2,500 and 3,500 Bengals which is the most populous. There was only about 25 in South China, and I’ve been seeing some reports that it could be up to fifty but if there’s fifty then they are so inbred because there is simply no place to go to in South China. They are due to go extinct. I mean we’ve got computers and Internet and everything that we’ve invested since World War II but since World War II, three subspecies of tigers have gone extinct--The Bali, the Java, and the Caspian. We are not talking about extinct in the wild. We are talking about captivity. No one had the forethought to put a few into breeding so that we could carry on the species. So now in this country people are taking Siberians and Bengals and just letting them live together. Ninety percent of the tigers in this country are hybrid. We are losing the balance of the sub-species.”

Jack: You know today before I called you I went down to the Cahokia Mounds and after I ran up those steps to the top of Monks Mound around four times I took a walk around the other mounds for about four miles and during that walk I must have seen about fourteen deer. And honest to God, Wayne, I was thinking about a gun article I might do, and that just got me going and then I went to this little wooded section and by God this deer was about eight feet away.”

Wayne: “Isn’t that phenomena though?

Jack: “I know. Eight feet. And he just ambled off until he was about twenty-five feet away, and she had her little fawn behind and they were both eating off the branches of the tree and I just kneeled and talked to them for about five minutes. I’m thinking these guys think they are tough guys shooting these deer with whatever they are shooting them with, and I’ve got a lot of guns myself. You know that.”

Wayne: “I love guns and I love shooting them, but I shoot at targets.”

Jack: “Yeah. I do too.”

Wayne: “I mean hunters are a necessary evil because we’ve already killed off the predators so now the prey, the whitetail, cars hit them everyday in my neck of the woods because there’s overpopulated. So they have to be thinned out, but it’s not going to be me that does it. But when they put their pictures in the paper and it’s Big Bwana this. What they do, they went and bought some elevated house where they sit nice and cozy warm and they put salt lick down before, then they put some deer corn down, and the deer goes out there everyday and he’s got his corn and his lick of salt, and he’s just loving it. This deer has got himself a little deer haven, but Bwana is up there in this tree during the hunting season with his high powered telescopic rifle that a nine year old couldn’t miss with, and while that deer is sitting there and enjoying his fat, boom, he blows him away, and then he stands in the street corner in front of the processing plant and he’s telling everybody how good he is, and then the newspaper is full of two or three pages of “Oh, Charlie is ten years old and this is his first buck. I mean, I’m not a good person to be living in a hunting area.”

Jack: “I do all this bicycling on these bicycling trails out here and I’m seeing deer all over the place so it wouldn’t take much for me to get a deer so I’m thinking, Tigers are almost extinct and some they have made extinct, so I’m thinking, “What does it take to take out a tiger?” It doesn’t take much of a rifle to put a tiger away, does it?”

Wayne: “Oh No. You know if you are a good shot, you can stop anything on earth with a plain old 30-30.” Any .30 caliber bullet will stop an animal if you know where to place it.”

Jack: “Even an elephant.”

Wayne: “An elephant? Well you’d damn well better know where the soft spot and the heart is. If you hit an elephant in the hide you aren’t going to do anything with a 30 caliber. You put a 30 caliber bullet between the eyes of any animal on earth and you are going to drop it.”

Jack: “So a 30-30 is going to do the job on a tiger?”

Wayne: “Oh, you can kill a tiger with a .22. If you go for the head. But if you are aiming at the body–the bodies are not heavily muscled except for the arms and the shoulders. So a high velocity slug like a .22 would easily go into the heart. The thing is with the small bullet if you don’t hit the vital organ you don’t stop him. But a thirty-thirty would stop a tiger. The blow would stop him. But technically all you need is a starter’s pistol. Because the big cats are not very brave. They hunt just out of necessity. But they are nearly always in hiding. They totally avoid man. They don’t eat men, they don’t go near men, they are afraid of men. Once in awhile you’ve got an old crippled cat that can’t feed himself anymore. He’s starving to death, and he may try to take a small child because he has to have some sort of food or he will die. And then they say, they say a lot of things in the world that are not true, they say that once they’ve tasted human flesh that that’s all they want after that. But they also discover that humans are about the easiest animal to kill. All they know is that the human is the most dangerous animal there is.”

Jack: “Do you feel that a four hundred pound tiger or any four hundred pound cat is dangerous for you or for anyone else to show in a night club?”

Wayne: “Four hundred pounds is, again, just a little beyond. It’s not dangerous to me. No. But it gets to a size where if he darts quickly, he can drag me with him, and he can reach somebody. Where at 300 pounds, if he darts quickly, I can still bring him down. I can drop my 205 pounds on the stage, and he can’t pull it.”

“Jack: “So then the obvious answer is that a fifty pound cat is not dangerous in a club?”

Wayne: “No. Not at all. But...it’s dangerous if it’s with an idiot. Any cat with an idiot is dangerous. Like when a girl sticks her hair in the cat’s face and has him going for her face with its claws open and everything. But you got girls who if they get a scratch she is going to scream bloody murder and sue you. “

Jack: “Now are you licensed or bonded or have insurance?”

Wayne: “We have insurance and the permits that we have are U.S.D.A. Affis which is an organization that shouldn’t even be in existence. It’s just a waste of money because what they basically do is with pet shops and dog breeding places and things like that.”

Jack: “Well, like what kind of insurance do you have?”

Wayne: “We carry a million dollar liability.”

Jack: “So if you went to Caesar’s Palace or some place like that, you can claim, “We’ve got a million dollars liability?”

Wayne: "Exactly."

Jack: “You have talked to me several times about possibly having a calendar. On the order of my Xtreme Weapons calendar.”

Wayne: “Absolutely. I’d like to have twelve of the hottest, hottest, hottest girls in the world. Or six of the hottest to do two months each. Or maybe three months each. Actually an 18 month calendar might be better. Because this is something someone’s going to want to keep for a long time. We call it “Endangered Cats in the World”, which obviously we are talking about the endangered tigers. And other cats, but also we refer to ladies as cats, so endangered cats is a double meaning. And one of the biggest drawbacks to calendar sales is there’s still a lot of men who are afraid to bring one home because their women will not stand for it. But women are fascinated by the cats. So the women will allow the calendar with the cats in their house. And there will be no topless. They will all be tasteful. They will be better than “Sports Illustrated, and they will all be different.”

 

Jack: “You know what I’ve been thinking? I could take a small article about each cat and in that article put in a quotation from you. It would be in italics. There would be the title for that month, then beneath that for instance, something about your dream of having this calendar.
Wayne: “There are two things I’ve always wanted–the calendar and Big Cat Paradise.”

Jack: “Big Cat Paradise? What’s that?”

Wayne: “Well..it will be a refuge open to the public but it won’t be like anything the world has ever seen before. I just need a backer. I need someone with money who wants to do something. A million dollars would do it. You get a couple hundred acres. You start with a 20 acre parcel that will hold 150 cats. And you build these compounds that would run from 15 to 30,000 square feet each. And you put streams, rivers, waterfalls, rocks, I mean it would be so natural that it would be heaven on earth for these cats.”

Jack: “What type of climate would it have to have?”
Wayne: “It wouldn’t really matter but for it to be self supporting, it would have to have easy access to a thoroughfare like an interstate. And the more Southern you are, the more year around you could be open. I’ve already got the drawing. I guess I’ve never showed it to you. But you first show off the drawing. And the first person you want to show it to is the person who will do the digging because he’s going to know how to dig all your trenches, and all your swimming pools and your rivers, and the public is going to come by like gang busters to help you get it accomplished.”

Jack: “So it would be like a very large zoo?”

Wayne: “Something like that except it would be much more natural than a zoo, and the animals when they feel like it can get out of sight, and most of the animals in it will be animals that I’ve raised. Cat Paradise is just a dream. I need someone who’s got the land and the money or somebody who needs the tax loss or a city that wants the traffic. Because can you imagine just one park with 150 cats of seven species, where you can go to one place. I mean people want to see the big cats. They go to the zoo, half the stuff there they have no interest in seeing. The cats, the monkeys, gorillas, but the cats is the biggest attraction in the world. If you had black panthers, snow leopards, spotted leopards, jaguars, white tigers, Bengals and Siberians–all these different animals in one place? Over at Disney World at Animal Kingdom they charge $45.00 to see the animals. First off school tours would be free, and we would only charge $5.00 because we want everybody to learn and see. There would be four signs in front of each cage. And there would always be sound going. They would tell you the names of the cats in that cage, how to identify the one with that name, where his origin was from, and how many are left, why they are going extinct. There will be a total history on every animal there. Verbal and in signage.”

I’ve photographed entertainers with three of Tiger Wayne’s big cats over the past year. What’s next–a pale beauty with Scandinavian features with a black leopard, a captivating Oriental or black model with a White Tiger? For the right girl, getting her pictures done with one of the great cats has to be the ultimate. And what a calendar–the dream-- twelve fabulous women, some of the finest lookers in the world, each with a different cat, but would this be just the tip of the iceberg that would eventually lead to Tiger Wayne’s Dream–of Cat Paradise, a Mecca for not just Americans but the peoples of the world to look forward to. But for now, just one thing at a time–Tiger Wayne’s door is open. My Nikon D-1 X is ready. For the woman who wants the ultimate in photography, who’s got what it takes, and is willing to pay for it, the door is open.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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