Jeff and Lauren Lowe

 Trailer trash and wildlife abusers!

Mirage and Caesar, born in December 2020, were the last in a long line of tigers to start life at Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park—and among the first to escape the Oklahoma petting zoo’s cycle of breeding and alleged mistreatment. The zoo has been closed to visitors since October 2020, and today, a court decision permanently bans the zoo’s owners, Jeff and Lauren Lowe, from exhibiting animals to the public in a facility or online.

Among the alleged violations prosecutors cited was a lion cub named Nala, found by government inspectors lying unresponsive in the mud in June 2020. They also documented two arthritic wolves caged on a concrete floor, a grizzly bear whose bones showed beneath her skin, a fisher cat with a lame leg, and the bodies of two tigers buried under burned rubble. The corpses were attracting biting flies that inflicted bloody wounds on the ears of nearby tigers, bears, and wolves.

In June 2020, a federal judge ordered the Lowes to relinquish the property to Big Cat Rescue sanctuary owner Carole Baskin to settle a longstanding legal dispute.

After Lowe’s license to exhibit animals was suspended in October 2020, he forfeited it permanently. But he continued to sell “shout-out” videos featuring his animals on Cameo, National Geographic reported. At the time, no laws existed pertaining to exhibiting animals online.  

Between January and August of this year, the justice department confiscated 146 animals from the Lowes—the agency’s largest confiscation of zoo animals to date. Various sanctuaries have taken them in.