My eyes watered as I wandered up to the fence of Ligertown, partly because of the smell and partly from knowing that animals with such strength and dignity had been suffocated in dingy, degrading shacks.
The first thing I noticed about Ligertown was the flies. Swarms of them everywhere.Then it was the smell - suffocating and sickening. I carried the odor of Ligertown with me for hours after I left. I don't know if it was really on my clothing and my skin or just in my mind.
As I approached a pickup truck on blocks, detective Andy Thomas described how he found the animals with no water, no food and no way out.
I saw the garbage, fur, feathers and feces covering every bit of earth or floor. And then there was the seemingly haphazard way the buildings were constructed and connected into a labyrinth with no order.
Like the veterinarians working with the African lions and the hybrid wolves, I have never seen anything like Ligertown.
Filthy, disgusting and sickening don't begin to describe the conditions that these beautiful and majestic cats live in.
The roar of the liger, a cross between a tiger and a lion, sounded not proud but terrified and angry. There was a dead kitten in one cage, the half-eaten carcass of a male lion in another. Chickens roamed aimlessly outside the cages of the wolves and lions.
Friends of the owners insist it was finances that kept them from providing an "adequate" environment for the cats. But something my mother told me as a child kept ringing in my ears as I tried not to smell the odors that clung to me.
"Even if you're dirt poor, you don't have to be dirty. You take care of what you have; you keep it as nice as you can. Being poor doesn't mean you live like a pig."
Everyone I talked to in town knew the conditions the lions and wolves lived in, but no one did anything about it. Most - even the police officers - say they didn't know what they could do.