@ /rosia - same thing happened with you and Bianca so here goes: Trade Lot

Servals have been kept as pets since the days of Ancient Egypt. The servals who live with humans in the USA, Canada, and most European cultures are the descendants of servals who have been bred in captivity for half a century. They were not taken as babies from the wilderness in Africa.

They are raised by breeders--often the same breeders who breed Savannah cats, because Savannah cats are created through hybridisation of house cats and servals. Because they have been raised by humans for a good half-century at least, their personalities are different from the personalities of wild servals in Africa. They bond very intensely with one person, and they do not do very well if they are confiscated and taken to sanctuaries.

They don't want to live in the wild; if they get out, they get out because they are curious, and they can jump 8 feet, and then they get lost because they don't have the instincts to find their way around by themselves. They have many "wild" personality traits--they are prey-driven and they need to be fed raw meat, preferably whole animals. They cannot be punished and need to be trained only with positive reinforcements.

But they are also not capable of functioning in a wild cat sanctuary or the actual wilderness. While they were not produced as an experiment, like the pet Siberian silver foxes, humans have been breeding them and we have made choices about how they were bred that have made them more likely to form deep emotional bonds with humans.

While they are definitely not good pets for anyone who can't afford to house and feed them properly and get them a good vet who understands them, or for people who travel and move around a lot, they are incredibly loyal to their people.

When they are confiscated, usually because a neighbour becomes aware of them and reacts without thinking, they are miserable in sanctuaries because they pine for their owners.

You can't usually rehome a serval.

The Merry Widow of Tampa wants you to think they've all been poached and abused. Maybe she thinks that because the ones in her sanctuary are so unhappy. Sanctuary owners are often a lot like CPS workers--burnt out and seeing the worst in everyone, because they see so many terrible things.

Some of them undoubtedly were purchased by people who didn't know what they were doing. (Which is much more likely to happen in areas where they are outlawed, rather than owners being required to get a licence for them and prove that they have the means and knowledge to care for them.)

But a lot of them just don't want to be solitary animals like wild servals.

I try not to get political in here, but I really need to get this off my chest. Most people who vote in favour of tighter exotic pet restrictions do so in the belief that they are keeping tigers out of city apartments and lions out of the suburbs.

That is already illegal.

We do not need a "Big Cat Safety Act" to keep people like "Joe Exotic" (Joe Maldonado-Passage) from abusing tigers. The BCSA has not passed, and guess what? He is in prison. He is in prison because abusing animals and trying to hire a hit man to kill your rival is already illegal.

I was involved for several years with the Feline Conservation Federation and had...not a ringside seat, but a cheap seat up in the nosebleed section...to some of the antics of Joe Maldonado-Passage and Carole Lewis Baskin. They are both jerks. She runs a dubious 'sanctuary' and a sizable number of the animals in it came from her and her former husband's failed exotics business. One of the reasons he is thought to have disappeared (and he had a restraining order against her) is because he wanted to take the cats when he left her. I totally believe she whacked him.

But the real reason that I can't stand her is that she has included in her so-called "Big Cat" Safety Act a lot of verbiage that will criminalise people like serval owners, serval and Savannah breeders, and people who have rescued bobcats--often as kittens--and raised them their whole lives. This is a common tactic of animal rights activists, who scare people with stories of apartment-house tigers while never mentioning that lizards, birds, snakes, ferrets and some types of rabbit are also considered "exotic pets", or that many so-called "big cats" weigh 30 pounds or less at adulthood.

Both the people and the animals suffer terribly when laws are enacted that lead to the forcible removal of happy pets from loving homes just because someone out there thinks some animal "shouldn't" live with people.

Remember, dogs were once wolves and cats were once wildcats. The hardest part of rehabbing wild animals can be keeping them from bonding with humans who care for them. Animals domesticated themselves, and contrary to the rhetoric of groups like PeTA, most of the ones who live with us are pleased with the arrangement.

If you're thinking of supporting the Big Cat Safety Act, please be aware it would criminalize the ownership of cats that are not big, not endangered, and not dangerous. She has not failed to get it passed because people are selfish. She has failed to get it passed because it's not a good law.

I'm not really into arguing about this and if I did argue about it I would drown you in citations, videos of happy animals with happy owners, and anecdotes. If you managed to get this far, thank you for reading. Rather than arguing, I encourage you to read what exotic pet fanciers and owners have to say for themselves and see if it doesn't change your mind.

Check out:

The Feline Conservation Federation