Lori Widener opens the gate of the 12-foot-high fence that surrounds the Carnivore Preservation Trust outside Pittsboro, North Carolina, and walks toward the home of her favorite resident, Scooter. "Where's my boy?" she coos, peering into an enormous walk-in cage that holds two binturongs— Asian bear cats. Slowly, a whiskery black head with blond tipping pops out of a wooden den, and Scooter's pupils contract as they adjust to the brightness. When Widener slips inside the cage, Scooter nuzzles her to mark her with his scent. Then he climbs her body and hangs from her neck by his muscular prehensile tail. Four years ago, when they were 2 weeks old, Scooter and his littermates were taken from their mother and given to Widener to hand raise in her trailer just outside the 35-acre compound's fence. Four times a day, she bottle-fed the animals a specially prepared formula of milk substitute, vitamins, and bananas. Most of the cats stayed two months, but the anemic Scooter required a blood transfusion from his mother and ended up recuperating inside the mobile home for anadditional four months. During that time he developed a laid-back personality that made him very easy for his keeper to handle. "He is not tame," insists Widener, an energetic 38-year-old who wears her hair in three waist-length braids. "He is not domesticated. He is merely socialized."
Fleet-footed caracals are able to chase down gazelles and knock birds from the air, but to African and Asian farmers, they are merely crop-destroying pests.
Scooter certainly lives more comfortably than his wild cousins do in the rain forests of southeast Asia. Binturongs, a threatened species of tree-dwelling civet cats, are hunted for their meat. Males are also slaughtered for their genitalia, which are used as an aphrodisiac. At the same time, land development is shrinking their natural habitat. Yet binturongs, which don't have the mass appeal of, say, elephants or tigers, have not been the focus of massive conservation efforts. Most American zoos, if they have any binturongs at all, have two or three. So the Carnivore Preservation Trust stepped in and now has the largest captive population in the world, as well as sizable populations of a handful of other threatened species of small wildcats. At last count, the nonprofit organization had 50 binturongs, 50 caracals, 39 servals, and 33 ocelots. The goal is to maintain large numbers of a few overlooked species, says the trust's executive director, Margaret Tunstall. "Then, when somebody realistically tries to protect these animals and their habitats, we will breed a generation of animals that can be reintroduced into the wild."
Laudable as that mission sounds, not every wildlife conservationist has embraced it. That's because the Carnivore Preservation Trust has upended scientific orthodoxy, defiantly dissenting from the principles and methods used by most zoos to raise and breed animals in captivity. While mainstream animal conservationists adhere to the doctrine of having mothers raise their own litters, the trust follows a policy of raising young carnivores by human hand. And while most scientists believe in keeping subspecies lines as pure as possible, the trust intentionally disregards those lines, creating "generic" animals not found in nature.
