In 2003, a man was admitted to a Harlem hospital with bite marks. He claimed he had been attacked by a vicious pit bull, but doctors didn’t believe him for a second.
His wounds were so large and deep that he seemed to have encountered an ancient beast rather than a dog.
The bitten man’s apartment was in an apartment building in Harlem. When the cops arrived, they prudently did not rush in, but slipped a tiny video camera through the crack under the door. On the screen appeared the contented face of a huge tiger, named Ming, who had lived in the center of New York for the past three years. And he had bitten his owner by accident: he was just playing around a little.
A brief history of Ming and Al
Authorities ran an elaborate operation to get the adult tiger out of the apartment without casualties. Two dozen specialists were involved: zoologists, the nature department, and, of course, a special police squad.
However, all the same it was not without surprises.
When the tiger was shot with a tranquilizer dart, the police went inside the four-room apartment and found a huge swimming pool.
In the water was resting a foot and a half alligator. As it would later turn out, his name was Al.
After such a find, the inspection of the rest of the apartment was delayed: no one wanted to open the wall cupboard, expecting a gorilla to pop out of there. But no other wild animals were found in the room.
As it turned out, Antoine Yates, the owner of the apartment, had secretly bought these animals on the black market and raised them as pets. All because of Mr. Yeats’s childhood passion for animals.
The interesting thing is that Yeats was just a construction worker.
That is, he never had much money and inherited the apartment. But despite all the difficulties, Yeats’s craving for animals won and he created a mini zoo at his home.
Every morning, Yates would buy three to four pounds of meat at the local supermarket; Ming especially liked chicken wings. The alligator didn’t have a particular preference.
Before Ming and Al, a lion cub and many snakes had been in the apartment. But those animals had to be sold. Rumor has it that Yates even kept a llama and a hyena in the apartment, but he denies it.
What became of the animals?
They were put in the local zoo, and Yates was convicted – he had to spend several months in jail and pay a fine. Now he can’t keep any animals in his home.Equally interesting in this story is the fact that none of Yeats’s neighbors seem to have suspected a thing. Yates has been complained about a couple of times because of the smell of urine and noise, but no one has expressed even a hint that there is a tiger in the apartment.
Apparently, Mr. Yates was a master of stealth and taught it to the tiger.
He did all this for a dream: He wanted to create a special kind of zoo in New York, where visitors could interact with the animals and not just look at them through the bars.
He thought Ming would be the main animal in his project, because the tiger had been raised in constant care and was not aggressive. Unfortunately for Yeats, all those plans faded into oblivion after the tiger bit him.
In 2019, Ming died.
The tiger died of old age; he was in his early twenties – a very old age for a predator. Yates often visited him at the zoo, so their bond wasn’t completely severed.
Ming was even given a grave. Yates, however, did not immediately dare to visit it. Apparently, he was having a hard time with the loss of his friend.
Yates was never angry at the tiger because of the bites, according to him, Ming simply miscalculated: he chased the cat outside the window, and when they tried to stop him – in a playful rush – he bit the man’s arm and side and squeezed a little.