A 6-year-old black leopard with a long face and thinning coat yawned lazily in the desert sun, stretching its bony legs to expose where its toes had been chopped off for use in voodoo rituals.
Nearby, a 5-year-old mountain lion rescued from a fur farm in Nebraska paced in its wire enclosure, warily eyeing a passing groundskeeper.
Several feet away, a 2 1/2-year-old Siberian-Bengal tiger mix once kept as a pet in Kansas cooled off by dunking its massive frame in a tub of water.
This is the scene on a recent morning at Forever Wild, a wildlife animal sanctuary in the Mojave Desert town of Phelan run by husband-and-wife team Joel and Chemaine Almquist.
Remote corners of Southern California have become retirement homes for exotic and abandoned animals from across the country.
They provide homes for chimps and tigers employed by circuses and movie studios in their youth, then left to spend decades in sanctuaries; for monkeys and wolves that people took for pets only to realize they could not care for wild animals; for turkey vultures and crows that could not find homes in zoos.
They end up in one of several dozen licensed wildlife centers dotted across the region.
Most are run by private individuals moved by the plight of the exotic animals and mindful that those without shelter face death or a life in medical research facilities.
But a string of problems involving some of the sanctuaries has underscored long-standing concerns about how well the centers are regulated.
Last month, two chimpanzees escaped from their cages at a shelter outside of Bakersfield and viciously attacked a visitor, leaving him clinging to life. Around the same time, authorities allege that a tiger got loose from a shelter in Moorpark and roamed subdivisions for days before being spotted and shot.
"There aren't many other options for those animals," said Michael Markarian, executive vice president of the Humane Society of the United States.
"When the person is treating a wild animal as a pet, it's a time bomb waiting to explode," he added. "These are dangerous animals, and they should be in the wild. They shouldn't be in our neighborhoods."
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State Inspections
The state's Fish and Game Department is in charge of regulating facilities that shelter exotic animals. Under state law, department officials are required to inspect shelters, sanctuaries and zoos every year to make sure grounds, cages and care are up to code.
