A female white tiger cub seized in Louisiana several weeks ago has found a new home at an exotic animal sanctuary in California, but authorities are tight-lipped about exactly where the animal was found.
The apparently orphaned tiger was transported to a facility run by Lions Tigers & Bears, a Big Cat and Exotic Animal Rescue in Alpine, California, on Dec. 22, and Director Bobbi Brink said the 5-month-old cub is adjusting well to her new surroundings.
“She’s actually doing really, really well,” Brink said. “She is playing and happy.”
The organization said the animal was found at a noncommercial, unpermitted location in the New Orleans area and required “immediate medical attention for conditions consistent with severe neglect.”
Brink said she could not discuss where the cub was found due to an ongoing investigation, but she said it was malnourished, lethargic and suffering from ringworm when her organization was contacted about a month ago.
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The Audubon Nature Institute confirmed it cared for the tiger cub locally in its animal hospital in the intervening weeks, but it referred all questions to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
Melissa Collins of the LDWF confirmed the animal was seized by department agents, but she would not say where or when, citing an ongoing investigation.
It was not clear Friday whether the animal was the same one seen in a video posted to social media in October by Kentrell Gaulden, a Baton Rouge rapper who goes by the names NBA YoungBoy and YoungBoy Never Broke Again.
Gaulden posted a video on his Instagram account on Oct. 10 showing him sitting on a living room couch with a white tiger cub next to him. He stands up while talking about being featured on a recent magazine cover and leans over to scratch the tiger under the chin a few times, noting it tried to bite him while he was bottle-feeding it that morning.
“She good, though,” he says.
Several YouTube channels picked up that video when it was posted.
In August, YouTube videos cropped up of a photo shoot in front of what appears to be Gaulden's house in Slidell in which he was seen holding an orange tiger cub by the scruff of its neck. That animal, which is not a white tiger, was also seen in that video swimming in the swimming pool.
Gaulden, who was given a 10-year suspended sentence in August stemming from a drive-by shooting in Baton Rouge, could not be reached for comment Friday.
James Manasseh, the Baton Rouge attorney who represented him in that case, said he was unaware of whether Gaulden has ever owned a tiger but that he would pass along a message to Gaulden’s representatives.
The tiger in a video from the animal sanctuary and the one in YoungBoy’s video have similar facial markings, and white fur is a genetic mutation known as leucism that occurs naturally in only one out of every 10,000 births among Bengal tigers in the wild.
Brink said her organization made the 6,200-mile rescue trip from the West Coast to pick up the cub in the days before Christmas, swinging through Alabama and North Carolina to pick up five bears living in substandard conditions.
All the animals were brought back in a trailer to the nonprofit’s rescue facility for abused and abandoned exotic animals.
Lions, Tigers & Bears is dedicated to ending the exotic animal trade and bills itself as “one of the few sanctuaries in the United States with the highest level of accreditation from the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries and the American Sanctuary Association.”
"Unfortunately, we see this all too often," Brink said. "The exotic pet trade is a multibillion-dollar industry, often leading to illegal ownership like in this case. Many of these animals are pulled from their mothers when they are only days old. They are then subjected to very poor living conditions at the hands of individuals who quickly become overwhelmed by the level of care a full-grown wild animal requires. This in turn poses a very real threat to public health and safety."