Center Point, IN
The EFRC has been operating since 1991, when Taft moved to Center Point with two tigers and a leopard. It’s now home to 200 cats on 110 acres. Taft doesn’t advertise, but word of mouth brings him around 7,000 visitors a year, most of them kids on school trips. There aren’t many other reasons to visit Center Point, a sleepy place 240 miles southeast of Chicago that’s like a ghost town–the main drag has a boarded-up general store and antique shop, a diner with no patrons. But that’s exactly what Taft wanted. When he was scouting properties he told the real estate agent, “I’m looking for a place with no neighbors.”
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Around 130 cats are on display in the main visitors’ area, and 30 more are down the road in overflow pens in the yard behind Taft’s house, which also contains the EFRC’s offices. People who want to watch the cats at night can pay $120 to sleep in his extra bedroom, from which they have a great view of three of the tigers in the lighted backyard. Another 35 cats are in a restricted area an eighth of a mile away because they’re aggressive. “This tiger killed his trainer,” Taft says, as he walks past its pen. “Those two tigers sticking their heads around the bend are extremely aggressive. We don’t let anybody near them.”
Taft’s affinity for big cats goes back to childhood. Raised in Colorado, he loved the Denver Zoo and remembers when it first opened outdoor enclosures for its cats. During his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Indiana State University one of his professors talked about having once kept a lion as a pet, and shortly afterward Taft stopped at a pet store near his apartment. “I asked them about keeping big cats, and they said, ‘Oh, sure, that’s something that people can do.’” He says he started fantasizing about “driving around with a well-behaved cheetah in a Lotus.”
Taft’s construction skills come in handy at the center. “A large part of [keeping cats] is being able to build,” he says. His formal education hasn’t proved particularly useful, but he prefers hiring people with relevant degrees. “If they’ve stuck it out for four years in school, then they’ll probably stick it out for a while on a job,” he says. “The college grads we’ve had are better at record keeping, noticing aberrant behaviors, noting the onset of illness and disease. And they make more astute observations about mating cycles and all the attendant aggression–and certainly make for better tour guides.”
All exotic-cat rescue centers are supposed to be licensed by the USDA. The EFRC is, and the agency periodically inspects it. DNR officials have also checked it out. “The animals all appeared to be well cared for,” says the department’s Linnea Peterchaff, who went to see how Max was doing this past winter. “Their cages provide a lot of space in a natural habitat, with plenty of room for the cats to walk around and jump on platforms. Some even have ponds in which the cats can swim and play. The cages and perimeter fence were all secure.” She calls the staff “very knowledgeable.”
He goes on, “I think there are direct and strong parallels between the way animals behave and the way people behave–and I’m not trying to be anthropomorphic here. I mean, we all deal with aggression and flight and hunting one way or another–providing our sustenance, dealing with social interaction. And animals do all of this just like we do. So I think a relationship with animals with that in mind opens us up to learning things about ourselves, and that understanding in turn helps us understand animals in a better light.”
