Star Tribune
Carver County Fair tiger show brings concerns about safety, animal welfare from Humane Society
The white Bengal tiger raised its large pink paws and stretched out against the wire enclosure as its trainer dangled a piece of raw meat on a stick. Hundreds of Carver County Fair spectators watched in awe, some just a dozen feet away from the animal.
Promoters of the twice-a-day Tiger Encounter show at the fair in Waconia promise it teaches crowds about big cats and the value of conservation. But an animal rights group is saying the circus-like attraction is far from humane — and dangerous to the public.
“These aren’t house cats — they are large wildlife,” said Zack Eichten, Minnesota’s state director for the Humane Society of the United States. “This is just not a natural environment for them to be in.”
The organization sent a letter to Carver County Fair organizers a week before the event started, asking them not to bring Tiger Encounter back next year, he said.
Jim Klein, president of the Carver County Fair Board, said fair organizers try to bring in a variety of acts “that can make [visitors] feel good.”
“They love to see animals,” Klein said. “The children just love it.”
He said so far the tiger show has received a few complaints and “thousands of compliments.” Shows have been well-attended since the fair started Wednesday, with the bleachers full.
“I think everything’s been going well — animals are well-treated, clean, very relaxed,” Klein said.
The Tiger Encounter show features trainer and owner Felicia Frisco, 30, leading three tigers around an enclosure for about 25 minutes using a stick with meat on it. Thursday, in front of the crowd, she urged the animals to lie down on metal platforms and stand on their hind legs to show the crowd their height. One drank from a baby bottle. After the show, audience members could pay $5 to feed the animals using a stick.
As Frisco led the big cats — one yellowish-orange and two white — an audio recording shared facts about tigers and their plight in the wild. Frisco said the show is educational and promotes conservation.
“They’re facing mass extinction,” said Frisco, who said she and the animals split their time between Florida and Illinois. “People that make connections with an animal, then they want to do something about it.”
Frisco, who also works as a wedding planner, said the animals only perform four non-consecutive weeks out of the year and she doesn’t work on training at all when they’re not on the road.
New sights, sounds and smells “are the best things you can give an animal,” Frisco said, adding that they’re “not bored” on tour.
Exotic animals aren’t uncommon at county fairs around the state, said Steve Hallan, president of the Minnesota Federation of County Fairs. “We’ve had them at our fair [in Pine County]. It’s been a few years.”
Fair organizers in Dakota County nixed a tiger display planned in 2019 after the Humane Society and a local big cat sanctuary raised objections.
Hundreds of spectators, including many small children, showed up to watch the tigers in Waconia on Thursday. Eichten, from the Humane Society, also attended.
Demand for such shows has declined over the last five years since the Ringling Brothers Circus stopped using exotic animals in its circus performances in 2017, Eichten said, and smaller outlets followed suit. The public is also increasingly concerned about the safety and ethics of big cat shows, he said.
The Humane Society publicly objects to exotic animal shows around the country, he said, and continues to work on both state and federal legislation banning the performances.
Eichten said big cats are often stressed by large groups of people and loud noises, and transporting them long distances requires they be kept in “very cramped conditions.” The exhibit area is small, too, he said.
The animals wouldn’t perform unnatural behaviors for an audience unless they felt compelled, he said. He added that the tigers could escape and hurt audience members or their trainer.
“What it really is doing is promoting behavior that shouldn’t be replicated,” Eichten said. “Ultimately, it’s really at odds with conservation.”
Klein, the fair board president, said he had “no comment” on the question of whether it was ethical for wild animals to perform in a show.
Dustin Thompson of Chaska brought his two kids to the Thursday afternoon show.
“It’s a unique opportunity to see tigers close up,” he said, adding that if the animals were performing every day, he would have concerns for their welfare. He said there are also ethical questions about zoos keeping wild animals.
As she waited for the show to start, Mary Baney of Norwood-Young America said she was concerned about the trainer’s message, though she hadn’t heard about the Humane Society’s objections.
“I’m not sure I feel it’s humane, either, because they’re still captive and they’re still being made to perform,” Baney said.
Eichten said he hopes people who are worried about the animals’ welfare will contact fair organizers and make a point not to attend the tiger show themselves.
“The fair is really supposed to be promoting local agriculture, and exotic sideshows just don’t fit into that,” Eichten said.
Star Tribune
Celebrity chef Justin Sutherland gets two years of probation for threatening girlfriend
According to the criminal complaint:
Police were twice called on June 28 to an apartment in the 800 block of Front Avenue. During the first call, a woman told officers that everything was fine despite previously reporting that Sutherland had choked her and tried kicking her out of the apartment.
During the second call about 90 minutes later, the woman told police that Sutherland had briefly squeezed her neck with both hands, said “I want you dead,” pointed a gun at her and hit her in the chest with it, and at one point said he would shoot her if she came back after running off. Officers then arrested Sutherland.
Staff writers Paul Walsh and Alex Chhith contributed to this story.
Operators of the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center (JDC) have agreed to consolidate housing units, create a new programming schedule and retrain correctional officers in an effort to satisfy state regulators, who rebuked the downtown facility last month for violating resident rights.
Changes come in the wake of a scathing inspection report that accused the center of placing minors in seclusion without good reason to compensate for ongoing staff shortages. An annual audit by the Department of Corrections found that teens were frequently locked in their rooms for long stretches, due to a lack of personnel rather than bad behavior.
In response, county officials vowed to bolster staffing and retrain all officers tasked with performing wellness checks. Last week, the facility closed its “orientation mod,” typically reserved for new admissions, and combined male age groups to reduce the number of living units and provide heightened supervision.
The moves, including a new schedule, are expected to help prevent the undue cancellation of recreation, parent visits and other privileges to children in their custody.
“[Previous] staffing levels did not allow for all units to run programming simultaneously while having sufficient staff available to respond to incidents and emergencies in the building,” JDC Superintendent Dana Swayze wrote in a seven-page letter to state inspectors. “Programming is only cancelled on an as-needed basis based on the JDC’s ability to safely accommodate [it].”
In a Dec. 4 email to the County Board, Mary Ellen Heng, acting director of Hennepin’s Department of Community Corrections and Rehabilitation, assured elected officials that they had begun taking corrective actions but asserted that some of the report’s findings lacked context.
Heng pointed to a violation where teens were allegedly confined without cause, even when multiple correctional officers were sitting in a nearby office. She explained that, during the dates of the inspection earlier this fall, several officers observed in the office were still in training — and therefore not permitted to interact with the youths alone.
She also contended that while programming has been modified by staffing limitations, “this additional room time is not reflective of punishment, disciplinary techniques, or restrictive procedures.”
Tired of surging gun violence across St. Paul, community leaders and police are asking residents to help create a safer city.
The call for community support came Thursday night when officials from the St. Paul NAACP, St. Paul Police Department, Black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and the African American Leadership Council gathered at Arlington Hills Lutheran Church to talk about ways to decrease gun violence in the city.
St. Paul has recorded 30 homicides so far this year according to a Star Tribune database, two fewer than last year. But four of this year’s homicides happened in the same week, frustrating law enforcement and alarming residents.
St. Paul NAACP President Richard Pittman Sr. said that solutions to gun violence are “right here, in the room.” But without the community’s help, Pittman said their efforts could fall short.
“Over the last several weeks and months, we have experienced an uptick in violent crimes in our communities. [That’s] turned on a light bulb that it’s time [to] not have the police feeling like all the pressure is on them,” Pittman said. “Nobody wants to the responsibility of having to shoot someone down in the street. Nobody wants the responsibility of hurting somebody’s family. We all want the best outcome.”
Attendee Carrie Johnson worried generational trauma is derailing youth’s behavior, adding that she’s seen boys in middle school punch girls in the face. Migdalia Baez said mothers living along Rice Street feel they have nowhere to turn for help in redirecting their children. Some worry that their child would be incarcerated if they ask for help.
Larry McPherson, a violence interrupter for 21 Days of Peace St. Paul, said some issues stem from youth with no guidance. McPherson and others patrol hot spots for crime across the city, including near the Midway neighborhood’s Kimball Court apartments where fentanyl drove a spike in robberies and drug violations.
“We’ve got a lot of mental health [struggles]. We’ve got a lot of doggone drug addiction that’s going on in our neighborhoods. We all got the best interests at hand for all people in our community, but we’re just not working fast enough,” McPherson said. “Until we get feet on the ground, people coming out of their own community and standing up for this real cause to take back the community, we’re going to have the same outcome.”
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