Lions and tigers are kept legally in Ontario backyards. No one knows how many there are

The secret tiger next door: inside Ontario's world of privately-owned big cats

November 8|

Duration

1:16

People can legally keep lions or tigers in Ontario backyards, but provincial authorities don't know how many of the predators live in captivity across the province.

Ontario is the only province in Canada that has no licensing or permit system for keeping non-native wild animals, leaving it up to municipalities to decide what species residents can own.

In Wainfleet, Ont., a rural municipality 43 kilometres southwest of Niagara Falls, dangerous exotic animals became such a persistent problem that the township wrote its own rules in 2018 to give local authorities the tools to address the issue.

Enforcing it all falls to chief bylaw officer Mark Tardif, whose work has included policing a veritable Noah's Ark of exotic animals, from primates and sugar gliders (a type of exotic gliding possum), to pythons and tigers.

"A lot of tigers, probably five, six tigers, a jaguar, lemurs, kangaroos, water buffaloes," he said. "Snakes, unfortunately, lots of snakes."

Among his cases were dozens of animal escapes from a roadside zoo called Ringtail Ranch and, this spring, a Wainfleet resident who kept several tigers on a local property.

Zohaib Masood is shown with a juvenile tiger he kept on a property in Wainfleet along with two adult tigers and a hyena. The juvenile tiger and hyena were seized by Ontario's animal welfare services inspector. (Submitted by Zohaib Masood)

Whenever he deals with a call involving big cats, Tardif says he leaves himself an escape route.

"I usually leave my vehicle running and the door open, in case I have to bolt."

He says his protective vest was never designed for those kinds of encounters.

"I don't know how well this would hold up on a tiger bite," he said. "I want to go home at the end of the day. I have a family. So I do what I need to do."

Big cats, missing numbers

Wainfleet's bylaws require owners to register their exotic animals with provincial animal welfare authorities, but getting a clear picture of provincewide exotic animal ownership and related incidents from government records has proven difficult.

While Ontario allows people to keep dangerous predators, there is no provincewide system to account for them.

Two privately-owned tigers, seen here in an enclosure in Wainfleet, Ont. There are no federal or provincial rules when it comes to the ownership of dangerous exotic animals in Ontario, leaving monitoring and enforcement up to municipalities. (Mark Tardif/Township of Wainfleet)

Emergency responders might arrive at a property without knowing a lion or a tiger is present and when a municipality forces an owner out, they simply move their animals to another community.

CBC News asked Ontario for records of complaints and seizures invovling privately-owned big cats, as well as any statistical reports on those animals between January 2020 and May 2026. The Ministry of the Solicitor General said the records aren't kept in a single database and estimated the work would cost $1,050 — the equivalent of 35 hours of search time at Ontario's standard FOI rate.

"The records responsive to this request are not maintained as a single centralized dataset," the ministry said in a letter to CBC News, indicating the data was scattered across multiple systems, files and departments.

The Ministry of the Solicitor General said the OPP has "no classification system that captures occurrences involving 'exotic or dangerous animals.' "

A serval lies in the hay within its enclosure at Roaring Cat Retreat in Grand Bend, Ont., in this June 2019 Instagram photo. (Roaring Cat Retreat/Instagram)

An access-to-information request to the RCMP by CBC News about any information tracking big cats in private ownership also returned no records.

The only federal agency that tracks big cats is Environment Canada and Climate Change Canada.

It said in an email that two live tigers were imported into Ontario between 2022 and October 2026. Import applications must identify the animals' intended destination, but tracking ownership transfers, births and deaths is "typically the purview of provincial authorities," the department said.

'Giant gap' in rules

Once lions and tigers are in Canada, Kendra Coulter, a professor at Huron University College who heads the Animal Ethics and Sustainability Leadership program, says Ontario has no provincewide system to track who keeps them, where they end up or how many are born here.

"Falling through the cracks would imply that there was a floor in place, that there's some sort of structure or infrastructure around these animals and around the public," said Kendra Coulter, a professor of management and organizational studies at Western University's Huron University College, where she heads the Animal Ethics and Sustainability Leadership program.

"This is a giant gap that needs to be addressed," she said.

Kendra Coulter is a professor at Huron University College and co-ordinator of the school's Animal Ethics and Sustainability Leadership program. (Submitted by Kendra Coulter)

Coulter says because Ontario lacks any rules about exotic ownership, there are "covert networks" where people knowingly buy, sell and give away dangerous animals.

"We have no firm evidence, though we have reports" from law enforcement and people speaking off the record to researchers, she said. "Law enforcement has told me that some of this is happening online with commercial trading sites, but often in code."

CBC has not idependently established that animals are traded through coded listings.

Exotic animal owners are often reluctant to speak about it publicly. CBC News approached two private owners and Bervie Zoological Park, a roadside zoo near Kincardine, about 220 km west of Toronto — all recently had big cats seized by provincial authorities. None agreed to speak about the issue on the record.

When such animals are seized, they are often handed over to accredited zoos by the province. Many of those facilities were also reluctant to discuss the issue on the record. Some representatives contacted by CBC News said they feared confrontations with owners seeking to reclaim their animals.

Jungle Cat World Wildlife Park, a roadside zoo in Clarington, declined an interview and tour, but owner Peter Klose agreed to answer questions from CBC News by email.

"We believe that zoological facilities and research institutes with wildlife should be subject to provincial third-party oversight to ensure high animal welfare standards for all wildlife in captivity," he wrote when asked if Ontrario should introduce legislation governing the ownership of dangerous animals such as lions and tigers.

One town's ban, another town's problem

For Erin Ryan, the wildlife campaign manager at the animal welfare non-profit World Animal Protection, the bigger question is how those animals end up in private hands in the first place.

"Without any type of zoo licensing system or any type of permitting scheme, there's no requirement to show that you have the expertise, the facilities or the resources to keep either the animals or the public when safe when these animals are transferred to new places," she said.

Big cats peer through a fence at Roaring Cat Retreat in Grand Bend, Ont., in 2019. (Colin Butler/CBC)

In 2018, Ringtail Ranch's animals moved from Wainfleet, in the Niagara Region. In 2019, the owner resurfaced in Grand Bend in southwestern Ontario. After a battle with municipal officials there, the owner moved to Maynooth, in southeastern Ontario the following year.

In 2022, when four of the ranch's lions killed and ate a tiger, the owners were allowed to choose where the surviving animals would be relocated.

Brent Ross, a spokesperson for the Ministry of the Solicitor General, said the animals "were rehomed in appropriate settings to ensure their well-being. The location of the animals remains confidential for the same reason."

"They simply pack up shop and just move somewhere else where there isn't a bylaw," Ryan said. "Municipal rules can force an owner to move. They don't establish whether the next property is equipped to take the animals."

For Ryan, the question is what happens when the animals get to the next address.

"Municipal rules can force an owner to move. They don't establish whether the next property is equipped to take the animals," she said.

Coulter and her research assistants at Huron University College examined the bylaws of all 444 Ontario municipalities in 2020. At the time, half had no mention of ownership of non-native wild animals.

"You move 15 minutes west into the next county and there's no prohibitions," she said. "You can keep a tiger in your backyard."

In other words, municipalities can force dangerous animals out by creating bylaws, but without provincial laws governing where they're allowed, enforcing a bylaw in one town often shifts the responsibility to another place, resulting in a patchwork of rules.

Proposed rules, but no progress

There was an attempt to introduce a clear set of rules for Ontario in 2025 through Bill 35, a Liberal private member's bill that would require zoo licences, annual inspections and inventories recording births, deaths and transfers of non-native animals.

Under the proposed legislation, existing owners would be allowed to keep their animals, but would have to register them and undergo annual inspections. The legislation appears to have stalled. According to the Ontario legislature website, Bill 35 hasn't advanced beyond first reading since May 29, 2025.

CBC News reached out to Kanata-Carleton Liberal MPP Karen McCrimmon who sponsored the bill. Her office said it remains "in limbo" and they don't know if it will move forward in this legislative session.

Back in Wainfleet, Tardif stops short of saying whether the province needs clearer rules to govern the private ownership of exotic animals.

"I have no control over what the federal government does and provincial government does," he said. "It makes everyone's job hard, but these are the tools we have to work with and the legislation we have to work under."