Following a tip from PETA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has filed a federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA) complaint against Lisa Lopez, the operator of All Things Wild—a cruel traveling tiger exhibit that confines tigers to cramped trailers and hauls them all over the country to exploit them for photo ops.
All Things Wild hauls tigers from one festival to the next, confining the animals to barren, cramped cages and putting suffering on display at noisy fairs across the country.
The formal complaint alleges that Lopez exhibited tigers without a valid license and failed to maintain sufficient distance and/or barriers between the tigers and the public at the Alabama and Georgia state fairs in 2020.
This action follows PETA’s October 2020 investigation request into Michael Todd—another animal exploiter, whose license Lopez used to exhibit tigers illegally at the time. Later that year, the USDA terminated Todd’s license, and Lopez has since exhibited the tigers under her daughter’s license, Genesis Shur-Path Inc.
In addition, Lopez’s business partner, Marcus Cook—who confines the tigers used by All Things Wild on his property in Texas—had his own license to exhibit tigers permanently revoked in 2012 after he was charged with nearly 100 AWA violations. In 2017, Lopez was denied her own license to exhibit tigers.
We don’t yet know what penalty the USDA is seeking against Lopez, but one thing is crystal clear: The USDA agrees with PETA that Lopez’s shady, cruel practices violate federal laws.
No stranger to skirting law enforcement, the menacing menagerie known as All Things Wild drags along an extensive rap sheet wherever it travels.
This isn’t the first time Lopez has fallen foul of the law.
In March 2022, Fort Worth, Texas, city officials canceled her planned appearance at a fair after PETA pointed out that the display would have violated local laws prohibiting the possession of tigers and other wild or exotic animals. Last year, after PETA alerted officials that Lopez had offered paying customers photos with tigers at a flea market in Liberty, Texas, the USDA cited her and ordered her to stop illegally exhibiting the big cats without a license.
Here’s How to Help Animals Exploited at Festivals and Fairs
At festivals and fairs around the world, traveling menageries imprison wild animals in cages, haul them across long distances, put them on display for noisy crowds to gawk at, force them into stressful photo ops with humans, and deny them any semblance of a natural life. Don’t support these cruel exhibits, and urge festivals and fairs to leave wild animals alone:
