Tiger World found a home.
Nearly 10 months ago, a Chester County zoning board refused to allow Rock Hill's Lea Jaunakais to build a tiger sanctuary in that county after a backlash from residents terrified of the proposed refuge.
But the 31-year-old businesswoman is now buying Metrolina Wildlife Park, a zoo northeast of Charlotte near Rockwell, N.C. Jaunakais (pronounced YAWN-ah-KICE) has volunteered there for several years. Metrolina officially closed Dec. 31, and she plans to reopen the park this summer as Tiger World.
Timing isn't in her favor. Tiger World's resurfacing follows a Christmas Day tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo that left one visitor dead and two others injured.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture also has a pending animal welfare case against Metrolina's owner, Steve Macaluso, who is selling the 30-acre park to Jaunakais.
But Jaunakais remains optimistic, excitedly talking about the zoo that will become hers next month. She's already purchased several acres of land and a 150-year-old cabin beside the park. She's even built some big-cat exhibits on her newly acquired property. Those enclosures were approved by the USDA in the fall.
Four miles from Exit 68 of Interstate 85, the park sits off a dead-end path called Cook Road in Rowan County, N.C. New houses are rising in the area, the latest neighbors in a community that grew up around the zoo Macaluso opened in 1996.
Jaunakais expects the zoo to initially attract some 10,000 visitors per year. That's not many compared to a place such as Columbia's Riverbanks Zoo, which can draw thousands daily.
Not your average zoo
But the park isn't a mainstream zoo. It's rustic, the kind of wooded destination where visitors park in an open field and walk through paths beside chain-link enclosures.
Even the cabin, which Jaunakais hopes to eventually convert into a gift shop, has a sort of country/exotic flare. A Macaw named Mac greets visitors from his cage beside the kitchen table, which sits on a rug bearing the image of a tiger.
Pictures of tigers and tiger memorabilia are found throughout the living room and kitchen: a tiger bobble-head by the window above the sink, a coffee table with legs shaped like elephant heads, three couches -- one in leopard print, one in a white tiger pattern and a third covered in jungle-themed material of elephants, giraffes and tigers.
A lizard's aquarium sits above the television, which is tuned to Animal Planet.
This backwoods safari is Jaunakais' haven several nights a week. She spends the rest of her time back in Rock Hill, where she is the vice president of Industrial Test Systems, a company that produces strips and kits for testing water quality. When she's not in Rockwell, the animals have Adam Horton, who moved here from Florida to manage the facility.
No one could have convinced Jaunakais in March that she'd be here, sitting at her kitchen table talking about a place many Chester County residents wanted no part of.
Many of them, fearful of tigers mauling their livestock and families, motivated county leaders to ban exotic animals. But even before the ban was passed, a county zoning board unanimously ruled that Jaunakais' property didn't fit a special exception in the zoning code.
"I kind of didn't know where to go," she said. "I'd done so many things to move towards my goal. I was pretty crushed, actually. I remember my dad saying, 'Lea, it's not what's happened. It's the goal. The goal is that you want to have a tiger sanctuary and rescue animals. It's not over. ... It's only a delay. It's not going to end your dream.'"
Saving the tigers
Jaunakais' passion for tigers began at age 3 when she watched a National Geographic television program about humans destroying the tiger population.
Crying, she told her mother, "I'm going to save the tiger."
She went to Arizona State University and studied animal behavior. She trained, worked or volunteered at zoos and wildlife parks in Arizona, North Carolina and Florida. The idea of Tiger World came when she was a college student in the late 1990s. She wanted to work somewhere different from a conventional zoo. That idea developed into Tiger World, and about two years ago, she started looking for a place to fulfill her striped dream.
