A truck stop once famous for displaying exotic wildlife will no longer be housing animals, owners say.
This week, owners confirmed that the Tiger Truck Stop located in Grosse Tete, Louisiana, is going to undergo a renovation and will no longer feature wild animals on display. The change comes after former owner Michael Sandlin sold the truck stop to Johnny and Dana Ewing and business partner James Jarreau in June.
According to reporting from WBRZ, the Tiger Truck Stop building will be torn down and rebuilt on the same location within the next few months and the area that once housed the tiger cage will be paved over.
The Tiger Truck Stop’s latest resident, a camel named Caspar, will be sent off to a zoo.
The most famous animal housed by the Tiger Truck Stop was a Siberian-Bengal tiger named Tony who died at the age of 17. Tony first came to the Tiger Truck Stop at the age of 6 months old in 2001 and spent almost his entire life in a 3,200-square-foot cage in the truck stop parking lot. Animal rights activists fought for years to remove Tony from the truck stop.
The Tiger Truck Stop also gained notoriety in 2019 for a viral incident involving a truck driver who bit Caspar the camel’s testicles to escape after the animal sat on her while she was trying to retrieve a pet dog from the animal’s cage.
This is a crazy story involving, Casper the camel, a deaf dog, a couple entering an enclosure that says “no trespassing”, and biting a camel’s privates: “I bit his testicles to get him off me”
The Sheriff has cleared Casper if any wrongdoing https://t.co/X6HLmXHJFn
— Natasha Fatah (@NatashaFatah) September 23, 2019
The practice of keeping large cats like tigers as pets has come under fire since the popular Netflix tv series Tiger King showed the poor living conditions and abuse that the animals endured living in captivity.