Tigers, Cougars, and More in the Back Yard

"In wintertime they might go out and walk around for five minutes," she says. "But if I close the door, they'll all three press their heads against the glass, looking at me like I'm the worst person in the world."

Rigerman sits down at the bar to await the arrival of the cats. He booms about Ann's feline expertise.

Ann fusses. "They won't come out because of his loud voice," she says. "I told you to cut out the cologne and hair spray."

"Do you have any idea how that makes me feel?" Rigerman asks sadly. "It makes me feel terrible."

(Rigerman promises to quiet down and spends the next hour on the phone trying to renew his subscription to an exotic animal catalogue.)

Ann rushes to the kitchen for a piece of turkey breast. She steps into her hallway, meat in hand, and implores her kitties to at least come say hello.

"You don't want to at least say hello?"

Hiss.

"Oh, don't hit me! You don't want to come? You want to be nasty?"

Ann wears house slippers and a bright caftan. Her hair forms a perfect silver dome; bangs fall like a sheet of ice over her forehead. She smiles warmly and gestures in large sweeps of her head and arms. She walks with a slight limp — a symptom, she says, of never wanting to come into this world in the first place. The doctors had to yank her in with forceps, resulting in a small loss of motor control on her right side.

Ann had always wanted an exotic cat. She just never knew it was possible to own one. She grew up in Los Angeles and studied theoretical math at a small Christian college in Washington. Dancing was prohibited on campus. She left just before graduating and decamped to Manhattan, where her father lived.

She moved into an eighth-floor apartment and lived with a roommate and three German shepherds. One day, while walking the dogs, she came upon a Long Island man walking what looked like a small leopard. Before long, she found herself taking the cat, an ocelot, on the weekends while its owner partied at his house in the Hamptons.

"The ocelot just sat out on our terrace with no cage or anything," she recalls. "He used to play with the dogs and have a wonderful time."

One rainy summer, while visiting friends in Miami, she got bored and went for a job interview. She lied and said she planned to move here. Soon enough, she did. She found herself working 60 hours a week designing computer software for a variety of airlines. She remembers enjoying it. For a thrill she began sitting a Coconut Grove couple's margay. "I really wanted that cat to like me," she recalls. But every time Ann walked into the house, the cat would march to the middle of their white carpet and relieve itself in protest of her arrival.

One day, while the system was down at work, she noticed in the Miami Herald an advertisement for baby cougars and other exotics. She dialed the number.

To her surprise, she discovered she would need a license for a big cat. To obtain a license, she would need 1000 hours of "husbandry" training in a 12-month period.

So she spent weekends volunteering at a veterinary clinic in Fort Lauderdale. "The only thing I learned was how to clean large litter boxes and open cans of [zoo-grade] cat food," she says.

Finally, as she entered her late forties, Ann acquired an African serval named Pandora. She would take the cat for a six-month trial, she decided.

Pandora refused to be touched — a quirk she communicated by biting.

"She slept on top of me," Ann recalls, exasperated. "But if I woke up, I couldn't touch her." In order to put the cat in its cage, Ann had to devise all manner of clever trapping and baiting techniques, involving everything from stuffed animals to canvas harnesses. The 30-pound feline would wake up in the middle of the night and drink its entire bottle of water just to pee on her.

Ann was hooked.

She equipped her spare room with high shelves, huge litter boxes, and a serval-size ladder. From then on she continued to take care of cats: raising exotic kittens, finding owners for unwanted cats, and, of course, tending to her own flock (four, at its peak).

Ann installed a Murphy bed in the cats' room so she could sleep surrounded by the animals (a practice that ended about two years ago, when a serval named Tango taught the others how to leap onto her in the middle of the night).

Ann's cats have all been servals or caracals (or combinations of the two). The animals look something like a cross between a cheetah and a housecat. In the wild their long legs help them search for prey by leaping over the high savanna grass. They have been known to jump more than 10 feet into the air to catch birds midflight. In Ann's house, they have developed a taste for ground turkey, air conditioning, and television.

Ann has several brothers and sisters, but she considers her cats her family.

"I've called them my friends," she says. "I've called them my kids. But it's really not the same as a normal domestic [cat] or a dog. The top of their list is certainly not pleasing you."

In 1992 Ann became ill. She couldn't go to work for two months, she says. She was constantly exhausted and found herself unable to cope. After undergoing a battery of tests, she was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. She recalls losing her short-term memory and running a low-grade fever for three years. Things are slightly better now, she says, but not by much. "If I didn't have my cats," she says, "I'd be gone. They need someone to love them and feed them."

Rigerman rises and heads for the cat room. He meows loudly, and Ann's cats stare down at him from their high perches, hissing and baring their teeth.

"I remember once I was here and the licking started," he says, staring fearlessly at the canines of Ann's oldest cat, a pure caracal named Kira. "The licking turned to biting." The cat sank its teeth into Rigerman's arm. He sat calmly and waited for it to retract them. "Ann was mortified. But I told her: 'Ann what are you upset about?'"

Rigerman putters deep into the Redland, passing tree farms, fruit stands, and barren you-pick fields. The sun hangs low on the horizon as he inches his way, both horns blaring, down Krome Avenue. The rural byway gleams with the sinking yellow sun; everything is made beautiful in that light. Rigerman counts roadside memorial markers aloud and wonders why he and Ann never became an item.

He is happy to be back in this part of town, the place where his interest in owning cats was sparked. When he began teaching, he made a bond with a couple named Frank and Ellen Weed, who lived in a trailer out in the Glades. The two bred hundreds of cougars in what's now Everglades National Park. Ultimately they were shut down and kicked out after being cited ad nauseam by federal wildlife inspectors eyeing their land, but not before Rigerman had brought class after class out to see the Weeds and their cats.

He recalls a visiting troop of Boy Scouts one day needling an aging Frank Weed with questions. "Mr. Weed," said one boy in an obnoxious voice, "why do you have all these animals?" Rigerman loved Weed's response. "Because I want to and I can," the old man told him.

Whatever Rigerman owned, he brought to school. He was Mr. Rigerman, the oddball ecology teacher who disdained homework and reveled in field trips. "I love teaching," he says. "It's fun. Where else can I get that kind of an audience?"

After giving it up, he began substitute teaching. That was cut short in 2003, following a melodramatic flareup in a photography class. Several students accused him of disappearing into the darkroom in the middle of class and returning to conduct the remainder of the session in his underwear. They alleged that he terrorized them with a sack full of snakes and lizards, and made lewd and lascivious comments: mocking a girl about the length of her skirt, suggesting he had slept with their teacher, and telling one student she was "fucking beautiful" for her age.

He thinks the accusations were drummed up by a group of pernicious girls. The animals were harmless. He says his "underwear" was, in fact, a pair of shorts.

Rigerman battled the charges, and in August 2005 he was reinstated to an eligible list of substitute teachers. "You are prohibited from bringing any animals to any school site at any time," wrote Maria Teresa Rojas, assistant superintendent.

Rigerman heads west on SW 168th Street. A detour takes him over some nasty dirt roads before delivering him to a five-acre gated compound. The fence is impressive, rising high into the air with a cantilevered incline.

These are where his animals will go when he dies, Rigerman guesses.

Beyond the fence, flocks of emus graze on a large meadow. A massive bison idles up to a parked swamp buggy and begins scratching itself against the chassis.

Set back from the mass of wildlife is a large gray house.

Rigerman slowly rolls up a dirt road and settles at a sort of shed piled with the makings of a great Tom Waits song. Tractors and huge circus cages sit amid a clutter of engine parts beneath a wooden overhang adorned with cow skulls. A trio of mean pythons captured from the swamps sit idly in cages.

A broad-shouldered man with red skin and a trim black beard appears out of the distance. A thick, slobbery guard dog trots along at his side. The figure smiles and nods at Rigerman. This is his land, and his name is Frank Pajon.

Pajon came to the States from Cuba at the age of one. At age eight, he began working in his father's gas stations in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and sometimes got pulled out of school to work the pump during the cold winters. During his formative years, Pajon dreamed of living on a kind of jungle ranch, surrounded by every animal under the sun.

In 1973, at age 13, he moved to Miami. He wanted to be a veterinarian, he says, but joined the Marine Corps instead. After his discharge, he worked as an auto mechanic at Gables Lincoln-Mercury, which happened to be next door to a business owned by an animal importer and drug kingpin named Mario Tabraue.

Pajon had already taken care of a serval at that point, but Tabraue was into big animals. He hung out at Tabraue's business as often as possible and developed an eye for tigers and cougars. To Pajon, Tabraue was an animal guru — someone who loved and knew a lot about exotics. Pajon would not comment about Tabraue's legal trouble, but according to a Miami Herald article, he was busted in 1987 on racketeering charges (which included dismembering and burning the body of a federal informant). It was around that time when Pajon decided to get his license to own cats.

(Tabraue served 12 years of a 100-year sentence and has since resumed his import business on a compound in the Redland. He declined, through intermediaries, to be interviewed for this story.)

Pajon began keeping and breeding cougars. About five years ago he bought the adjoining lot and cleared the land. He put up eight-foot posts and wired them with electric fencing — all for the sake of lions and tigers. A year later he got his Class I license and purchased a pair of six-month-old tigers.

Pajon provides a brief tour of his menagerie as chickens skitter about his feet. Beyond a sliding gate, a mishmash of red deer, turkeys, peacocks, cows, geese, toy ponies, llamas, and a donkey roam the meadow Pajon cleared. Many peck at a pile of Cuban bread loaves put out that evening.

The place looks like a strange slice of Xanadu, a sort of rough-cut exotic dreamscape dotted with the occasional palm tree. Though Pajon's place is located in Miami-Dade, it seems a planet away from the chintzy boardwalks, seedy ghettos, and cookie-cutter suburbs that define Miami in movies.

Pajon has made himself a paradise, or at least he's working on it.

He wanders over to a female lion named Nala. "That's Alan spelled backwards," Rigerman chimes in from over Pajon's shoulder.

"It's also the name from the Lion King," Pajon replies.

Rigerman purchased the baby lion last summer — he maintains a Class I license, but only for infants — and turned it over to Pajon after three months.

The cat's fur is matted; it looks exhausted. Pajon recently dropped close to $1000 treating the lion for toxoplasmosis, a parasite typically found in domestic cat poop. Nala is slow, Pajon says, from the medicine.

Stray cats have been traipsing on his property and might have contaminated the lion's food. At the advice of county police, Pajon and his rifle keep a lookout for roving feral packs of the town's unwanted pets.

Next Pajon crosses to Sinbad, a 600-pound Siberian male tiger. He's being held in a temporary cage, cobbled together out of a section of white tile flooring and chainlink fence. The Siberian (the largest cat in the world) lumbers toward the fence as Pajon nears, stroking itself against the metal weave as if the links were the fingers of a benevolent giant.

Pajon walks deeper into his property, past a wolf in a circular enclosure to a huge oblong cage where his most precious creature is kept: Umba, a 400-pound female Bengal tiger. She leaps out of a plastic hot tub liner, shooting gallons of water playfully toward Pajon. The cat eats roughly 15 pounds of fresh meat a day and seems to melt before her master.

"I try to sit with her for at least a half an hour a day," he says, gazing at the deep orange lines that slither and slide over her massive sides.

He has never trained her to perform, he says. "If you train them to perform, you can't touch them," he says. "You have to use the whip." Though he has spent as much time with Umba as possible and accustomed her to walking on a leash, Pajon attributes her pleasant nature to the luck of the draw.

He ducks through the outer door and into her cage without hesitation. While he shovels out some unwanted bones and droppings, Pajon turns his back to Umba.

"I trust her completely," he says, taking her head in his hands and placing a heavy chain leash around her neck. He walks her like a big dog, muttering "leave it" out of the side of his mouth as she eyes a passing chicken or a cage full of yapping Dachshunds. Pajon proudly leads his tiger up onto the bed of his pickup truck and back down. He wraps his arms around her neck and squeezes — a tremendous, sphincter-puckering hug.

Pajon makes a living as a corrections officer, often working double shifts in the Miami-Dade jail system. He might begin at 4:30 a.m. and end at 9:00 p.m. On a good day, however, he will get home at noon and spend quality time with his animals.

He has brought the tigers on Sábado Gigante and to photo shoots in an effort to offset the cost of the upkeep. He and Rigerman plotted a recent event at Club Space, to exhibit the tigers in cages outside to net a windfall of $5000, but the deal was broken when animal rights activists got hold of the flyers, lobbied city officials, and hounded the club owners. Rigerman offered to show up with his porcupine and a few snakes, free of charge. But the club turned him down.

As Pajon leads Umba back into her cage, he regards the grounds with a squint. "If it was up to me," he says, "I'd get a baby elephant. Boy, if I hit the Lotto...."

The sunset is casting strange light onto the animals in Pajon's back yard. His helpers have all headed home by now. Rigerman wheels out the front gate. Before darkness settles, Pajon will release a trailer full of guard dogs to roam the property.

Rigerman is happy to know Pajon is around. At his age, Rigerman says, he couldn't buy anything new without knowing he had a place they could go. "And that's Frank," he says.

Meanwhile Rigerman is looking to purchase a baby serval. "I want it as a house cat," he says. "I'll neuter it, declaw it, and let it roam the house."

What about Oreo?

"They'll get along," he says.