Caught Again: Tiger Cub Mascot Supplier Racks Up More Animal-Welfare Violations

Inspectors Find Tiger With Open Wound, Filthy Cages, Unsafe Fencing at Unaccredited Stump Hill Farm

For Immediate Release:
July 28, 2015

Contact:
Sophia Charchuk 202-483-7382

PETA has obtained a June 29 inspection report of Stump Hill Farm—a notorious roadside zoo in Massillon run by Cyndi Huntsman, who supplies tiger cubs for the local high school football team to use as mascots—that reveals that the facility has been slapped with yet another set of citations from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for violating the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA). The serious repeat violations include denying adequate veterinary care to a tiger with a 2-inch open wound on his right side and failing to maintain safe, secure perimeter fencing. Rabbits were fed from filthy feeders encrusted with dried, old food, and flies swarmed the enclosure that housed baboons.

“Report after report of ailing animals and filthy, unsafe enclosures shows that Stump Hill Farm can’t, or won’t, provide animals with adequate care,” says PETA Foundation Deputy Director of Captive Animal Law Enforcement Brittany Peet. “PETA is calling on kind people to stay far away from this dangerous, abusive facility.”

New dangerous-animal regulations went into effect in Ohio in January of 2014, more than two years after law-enforcement officers were forced to kill 48 wild animals who had been released by Zanesville resident Terry Thompson before he killed himself. Huntsman’s unaccredited operation has failed to meet these regulations.

Stump Hill Farm’s dozens of previous AWA violations include denying adequate veterinary care to multiple sick or injured animals, illegally declawing a tiger, preventing officials from investigating animals and records, and jamming tigers into cages so small that the animals couldn’t move around freely, among many other citations.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.