This article was originally published in The Essay Magazine in October, 2012. The magazine is unfortunately no longer in service.

On this chilly October morning, like many other mornings, Jim Galvin reaches over and silences his screeching alarm clock. He somberly rolls out of bed and fumbles down the stairs. He then slides on his boots and creaks open the screen door to step out into the crisp autumn air.

As Galvin crosses the yard he peers out into the many acres of beautiful countryside where he and his wife have decided to spend their post-retirement years, relaxing and enjoying each other’s company. As he continues to walk, he stops and reaches down to pet his cat. He strokes his soft fur and scratches under his chin until the cat begins to nuzzle his hand, making sounds of affection and adoration. Galvin kneels down and puts his face up to the cage as the cat gently licks his cheek. He returns the favor by kissing him on the nose.

So why is this man, who clearly adores his cat, keeping him in a cage? Why would a retired veterinarian, with nothing but the highest respect for animals, keep his pet behind a grid of metal wiring instead of letting him roam free? As Galvin leans in and kisses his cat Dudley on the nose once again, he stares deep into his amber eyes and knows, no matter how loving this animal is, in the farm land of New Marshfield, Ohio, it is never safe to let a 400 pound tiger roam free.

Galvin’s fascination with tigers began when he was just a child growing up in Toledo, Ohio. In first and second grade his class took a field trip to the Toledo zoo. Walking through the paved streets past all the exhibits, with a symphony of animal calls filling the air, he found himself in front of a tall, three-story stone building. Upon entering the building, or as Galvin called it, the echo chamber, his stare caught that of the Siberian tiger who was peering back at him through the metal framework of his cage. With monkeys shouting on both sides of the cage, the level of noise was almost unbearable for Galvin, giving the young boy a migraine within moments. “And I looked at that tiger lying there and it hit me. I looked in his eyes and I thought—you’ve heard the expression ‘dead man walking?’ Well, that’s what that tiger looked like. He just looked like he’d prefer to be dead than listening to all that all day,” Galvin recalled. “And I just felt so bad, and it just kind of hit me. And I’ve had a passion for them ever since.”

After a long and successful career as a veterinarian in the Toledo area, Galvin decided it was time to hang up his hat and start a new chapter of his life. “I didn’t know what I was gonna do when I retired,” he said. “I’m not one of these people that could sit and play golf every day, I’d be bored out of my gourd.”

In a chance conversation with a zoo vet about six or seven years ago, Galvin expressed his regret about never getting into zoo medicine and working with big cats. In order to work as a vet for exotic animals, Galvin would have had to intern at a zoo for about two to four years. However, the vet informed him that he didn’t have to go into zoo medicine to work with big cats because there is no difference between them and the house cats he had been working with for years. The wheels in Galvin’s mind began turning.

After moving out to New Marshfield, just a few miles outside of Athens, Ohio where his wife Becky grew up, Galvin began to transform his garage into a safe, spacious pen for a tiger. In September of 2009, after putting much time and effort into preparing a space for his future animals, Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio began talk of putting an executive ban on all exotic animals. Galvin, in a panic, picked up the phone and called his friend Psy who lives in the area and, because of his similar passion for exotic animals, had built up a network with other big cat owners. “I thought, ‘my God, I won’t even get grandfathered because I don’t have one sitting here!’” Galvin said. He then did something he swore he’d never do, and has not done since—he purchased a tiger. “He’s the only one I’ve bought and he’ll be the only one I’ll buy. I won’t buy, sell, breed, trade or anything else at this point,” he explained. Galvin’s facility is simply the equivalent of a rescue shelter for dogs, where he takes in tigers who have been injured or whose owners can no longer take care of them.

After three years of transforming his back yard into an enclosure, Galvin has acquired three more tigers: Dudley, the big boy weighing almost 400 pounds, Louise, his only girl, or as Galvin calls her, his “sweetheart”, and Grumpy, the youngest, who at one year old weighs 185 pounds and is expected to grow as big as Dudley. Familiar with the community of tiger owners, Psy had heard that each of these cats was in a situation where their owners could no longer provide proper care for them and knew just the guy to send them to.

Upon receiving the tigers, Galvin faced many frustrations. In fear that their animals may be taken away from them, especially with law enforcement cracking down on regulations after the incident in Zanesville last winter, big cat owners tend to be very secretive. This left Galvin with little to no history on the tigers he received, besides that Boomer (his first tiger) and Louise had came from Northern Ohio, Dudley was flown in from somewhere in the Midwest, and Grumpy was from the Carolinas.

The second tiger he received, Dudley, who was four months old at the time, had diarrhea so bad that Galvin didn’t think he was going to make it. “He just laid there like a limp dish rag,” said Galvin. Without knowledge of Dudley’s former living situation, his previous diet, or his medical background, Galvin faced some challenges when figuring out how to treat this cat. “It took me about two weeks to straighten him around,” he said. “I would sit in his travel cage and talk to him and he’d just cry; he didn’t feel good.”

Each tiger has his own pen ranging in size from 16 x 16 ft. to 20 x 20 ft., depending

on the size of the tiger. He has also built two large exercise areas for the cats, one 40 x 70 ft. and one 50 x 100 ft., which gives them a lot of room to roam. “I love to watch them run out there in the play area,” said Galvin.

With each pen costing anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 in materials and labor, and paying for them all with his own money and retirement funds, Galvin has now hit a financial roadblock. Already having had to turn away 11 tigers, he is quickly looking for ways to raise the funds he needs to add in more cages. Galvin has been fortunate enough to have local college students volunteer to come out on the weekends and help him put in more cages.

“Maybe they only spend an hour or two, but I told them, ‘every hour you guys spend here is one less thing I have to do’,” Galvin said about the volunteers. “So it allows me to get more done. Any little bit helps.”

One volunteer, Brenden Robinson, who helped to lay down gravel in the tiger cages, was stunned to see the tiger’s reaction to Galvin. “You could just tell when he walked up, the tigers just knew. He put his hand in there and he just let them play with his hand,” Robinson said. “They let him pet them all the time. They just—they act like it’s their dad and they just love him.”

More than showing the cats love and affection, Galvin also focuses heavily on safety and high security when it comes to these animals. With multiple layers of fences and cages, barbed wire lining the tops of the cages, and three padlocks with three separate keys, which Galvin keeps possession of on a key ring, there is no chance of these tigers getting out or anyone getting in without his knowledge. “We never really felt in danger at all,” Robinson said. “The set up that he has there is really sweet. It’s not just a tiny little cage or anything like that.”

After the Zanesville incident, current Ohio Governor John Kasich signed a bill that banned new ownership of certain exotic animals and also required current owners to register their animals with the state.

The incident has had a negative impact on Galvin’s future plans and his progress. Shortly after the Zanesville incident, Athens’ Sheriff Patrick Kelly was quoted in the paper voicing his concern about Galvin housing exotic animals. “I thought, ‘oh boy’,” said Galvin. “So I invited him out and once he saw the security fencing and what I’m doing, he said, ‘actually I understand what you’re doing, doctor, and I think this is fine.’ He actually brought his granddaughters out last time he came out.”

But even with the sheriff in his corner, the new laws have definitely put a damper on the plans that Galvin had for his property. He had envisioned an 80-acre animal sanctuary with 20 pens, each an acre big (larger than any zoo’s in the country), allowing him to house up to 40 cats. He had hoped to establish a sanctuary that he would later sell to the zoo. “I’m not going to live forever and obviously my wife and my children aren’t gonna want to have to deal with a bunch of cats,” Galvin said. But

with the new law he will not qualify and will have to settle for being a small rescue center that houses a maximum of six to eight cats. “A lot of things changed with Zanesville,” he said. “I had big ideas.”

Galvin now plans to do some fundraising to build a few more enclosures so he can take in more tigers that are in need of a home. But until then he will have to settle for his four tigers, his geese, and his two goats, all of which run to see him as soon as they hear his footsteps. Galvin’s animals are drawn to him like a magnet in a way that could only be described as “the Doctor Dolittle effect”.

As he crosses the yard on this crisp autumn morning, the sound of tigers chuffing in the distance, a retired man counts his blessings and hopes for the day when his visions will become realities.