The Dark Side of Exotic Pet Ownership | Fatal Attractions

It's a basic instinct for humans to want to share their lives with animals. They can provide comfort and companionship. But for some people, the desire to live with another species can take them into obsessive and dangerous territory, sharing their homes with animals that are best left in the wild. Reptiles are ancient creatures, remarkable predators whose toxic venom and speed of attack gives them a powerful fascination. But what dangerous mix of obsession, loneliness and desire causes these people to cross the barrier between the reptile and their prey, living with animals that have the potential to kill? One day Ron came to work with blood on his shirt that he claimed to be from the tail of his cat. It was one of the scenes that is sort of reminiscent of a homicide. Part of his facial region had been consumed. The wound had been cleaned out, but you could actually see the flesh within the thumb. There was a lot of people who thought the guy was just nuts because they really didn't know him. They just knew what he did. Ron Huff was 42 years old, an ex-soldier who had previously worked in military intelligence. He looked like he was quite the shape, especially for his age. I was 41 when I met him and he was in excellent condition. He had said that he could bench press about 400 pounds and he worked out rigorously. In fact, he had a diet that was commensurate to keeping a very, very strong build and a very small amount of body fat. Ron Huff lived alone in a small studio apartment in the suburbs of Newark, Delaware. Few people even knew he was there. I'd call Ron an acquaintance. You know, he was a neighbor. We'd have just little neighborly talks at the mailbox and whatnot. If Ron was disturbed by a neighbor making too much noise in their apartment with their loud music, he would go down to the basement utility room and just shut their power off to their apartment. And that would usually stop the Friday and Saturday night parties. Ron Huff would let nothing distract him from his obsessive daily routine. He divided his time between his home and his work at a car lot in downtown Newark. He just looked like the type of guy that lived a very comfortable, relaxed life, not a conformist at all in society, but more of a guy that just lived life the way he wanted to live life. He was quick to smile and quick to joke or be friendly, but Ron would not initiate conversations with people much the way an average person would. He kept to himself. How are you doing? Oh, fantastic. How about your little friends at the house there? How are they? Huff didn't easily let others into his life, but his neighbor Jeff Wildonger was one of the few who came to understand that Huff's passion wasn't people, but animals. We were down at the mailboxes, and he was mentioning that he had a collection of lizards and wanted to know if I was interested in seeing them. And I went down there thinking that these lizards would be small in cages, and in fact they were six, seven feet long and had free reign of the apartment. Ron Huff had converted his whole studio apartment into a giant lizard cage. As a healthy temperature for a lizard is 80 degrees, Huff had heated up his home for the benefit of his pets. It was organized mayhem, if you would. You know, there was a lot of stuff in a small area. It was honestly a little intimidating. The first time I was there, he was feeding them raw chicken, and I was standing there wearing shorts, and he told me to stand still as they were licking my ankles so that I didn't threaten them. It was just a really bizarre situation. Wildonger also noticed that the animals that had taken over Huff's home appeared to be somewhat out of control. He did have problems with lizards fighting in his house. The larger ones would attack the smaller ones. He had a cat. The cat had been attacked several times. The cat had a very large scar on his back, hindquarters, from one of these lizards. But for Huff, it appeared that any injury was just an everyday part of living with his reptiles. One day, Ron walked up to us and said, you had asked me once if I was ever bitten. He could actually pull one part of his flesh away from the other. We had known that the monitors had injured his cat. Now we see the wound on his thumb, and we thought, maybe this isn't such a good situation. Maybe he doesn't have quite the control that he thinks he has over these lizards, and we became concerned because we didn't want him to become further injured. Ron's love of animals completed his life. He was very committed to being there when he needed to be there, being home when he needed to be home, and taking good care of them. Slowly, the animal gets weaker, and the dragon waits. It's a reptile. It has all the time in the world. Ron Huff had made a decision how he was going to live his life. He would work, he would look after his body, and he would care for his beloved animals. The dragons move in and finish it off. One day, we expected Ron to come to work at 9 o'clock a.m., and we didn't receive a phone call by 20 after 9. We figured, well, possibly, you know, he's ill, and we knew that he didn't have a phone. So the rest of the day went by, and we had never heard from Ron at all. The following day, we sent an employee to his apartment to see if Ron was okay, to check on Ron. We could hear TV. And there was no answer. The day came and went, and still no one had heard anything from Ron Huff. I had come home with my roommate and I. We were out at the local tavern, and could smell something unusual in the bathroom. And in this apartment building, the pipes ran up the central wall, so the smell from Ron's apartment was coming up this hollow wall into our bathroom. And I had thought at first it was a broken saw pipe. The next morning, I discovered where the smell was actually coming from. It had been three days since his work colleagues or family had heard from Ron Huff. It was completely out of character for such a conscientious man. The next day, his family called concerned because they also had not heard from Ron. So we called the police. You hear the term routine a lot, but the truth is it's never routine. Typically, when you respond to these types of complaints, it usually means either a person's out of town or they're deceased. In this case, we knew that he was not very mobile. In other words, he was sort of close to that community. They go to work every day on time. They contact their loved ones on a daily or weekly basis. And when a person doesn't do that, we had a pretty good indication that something had happened to him. The truth is we weren't prepared for what we found. I woke up that morning and could hear someone beating on the wall or the door. Headed downstairs to find out what was going on, and there was a pretty large group gathered. And I figured that he'd gotten in trouble for having these animals. As the officer was peering into the apartment, they immediately noticed that there were what appeared to be large lizards roaming about inside of the apartment. At first, the police saw Huff's lizards. And then, what they were feeding on. I think shocking is a pretty good interpretation of what we found. It's a pretty harrowing experience for the officers at first because primarily we didn't know what killed this individual. We didn't know if there was something inside, some sort of exotic animal that was responsible for it. We're not trained as far as lizards and knowing which ones are poisonous, which ones can hurt you, which ones are non-threatening. So it made it very difficult initially to conduct the investigation. But as we got closer and the evidence technicians began to take the photographs and look at him and examine the body a little bit closer, we realized that part of his facial region had been consumed. There was a lot of injury to his soft tissue. There was hands, his shoulders. Jeff Wildunger, one of Huff's few friends, found himself face-to-face with his neighbor. When the coroner and the medical examiner were working on Ron, they had the door open. It was such a graphic scene in my mind that I just felt like I had to try to get it out of my mind maybe. So I just scribbled down a sketch of kind of what had just been burned in my mind that day. His face was completely missing. You could see his molars up by his ears. His entire upper torso was just black from dried blood. His internal organs were strewn about. It was a horrific scene. Due to decomposition and the other injuries that his body sustained, we were not able to get a clear picture of what he looked like. When I was able to obtain a photograph of him, I realized that he was an individual that frequented the same workout facility that I did. The one thing that makes it a little bit more difficult is while I wasn't a friend of his, I knew him. But the police were only just beginning to discover who Ron Huff really was. As the police searched the scene of Ron Huff's death, they uncovered evidence that revealed an unconventional character. Huff's family photos painted a portrait of a man who grew up with and loved animals, but somehow this had turned into an obsession. Huff had taken hundreds of photographs documenting his pets. Handwritten notes recorded the best way of feeding and caring for his animals, and thick files cataloged the natural history of lizards in the wild. Ron talked passionately about his lizards, and the salespeople often called Ron a lizard boy. Ron would laugh, and he accepted the name, and I think in some ways he was complimented by it. Huff's obsessive knowledge of lizards seemed to define who he was. There seems to be some characteristics shared by a lot of exotic animal owners of certainly knowing an awful lot about the animals in the wild, and there seems to be a compulsive aspect to owning animals, as well as also identifying themselves with the animals, that often the animal seems to take over for the person's personality and be their kind of public persona to the outside world, and that without that animal the person no longer seems to feel like they have a legitimate place in society. In many ways, Ron Huff's obsession with reptiles was not unique. Here at Cincinnati Zoo, the former head of reptiles understands that he, and all those who work with these creatures, are different. My colleagues that I've worked with over the years, we're all unconventional by choice, I think. We have enormous egos, and I'm big enough to admit that. I have an enormous ego. We're introverted, but at the same time gregarious. We want to talk about the things that we're interested in, but we don't want to talk about anything else. Well, I was used to being thought of as kind of the weird herald because I didn't play baseball, football, basketball, or any of that stuff. Instead, I spent my time in the woods catching snakes. At that age, naturally, you want to be noticed by the women, so you want to be a part of the group. So there was a little bit of a problem there because I was kind of an isolation person. It doesn't bother me now. I've got some age on me now, and you just don't worry about being socially accepted when you're my age. When I was little, I saw a snake at a carnival, and my mother pulled me away, wouldn't let me near it. She got distracted at some bouquet of something, and I snuck around. The man let me hold it. That was it. I was fascinated from that point on. I must have been 5. You got a big rainbow boa, buddy. I just find that it's fascinating that they can do everything that animals with arms and legs can do. They can swim, they can climb, procure their food quite capably. And a better mousetrap has never been invented. The snake is it. They don't make good pets. They don't recognize you day to day. The most you can expect from a snake is its undivided disinterest. Smell your hand. If you put it out in front of him, you let him smell you. The difference between the various zookeepers often comes down to the emotional connection with their animals. You can see that the relationships that people who work with primates or cats or any mammal, those relationships are very different. They have emotional attachments to these animals, and they tend to view them more as individuals, so it's as if they were part of your family. When you work with a large collection of reptiles, you may have six or seven hundred animals in your collection. You tend to view them as a species. You're interested in a particular species of reptile, not an individual reptile. For a zoo professional, to have so many reptiles in their care is normal. But an individual with an overwhelming number of pets can be an indication of the psychological condition known as hoarding. Squalor often seems to be a prominent feature within animal hoarding. The waste of the animals, the containers for food, the bedding and whatnot. Often the lack of resources and funds lead people to keeping animals in their house or in their backyard, and their living space ends up mingling with the animals. He certainly shares a lot of the characteristics that are seen in the research for animal hoarders. Instead of the lizards sharing Huff's life, Huff shared theirs. They had taken over his home. Whatever its cause, the relationship that Ron Huff had with his pets was, in the end, a fatal one. The risks of animal hoarding are even greater when living with venomous reptiles, such as snakes. Within the reptile collection at Cincinnati Zoo is a snake that was confiscated from an owner in the city. The owner's name was Alexandria Hall. It's 2004, and Hall is on a journey to save her life. Her pulse is racing. She is lightheaded and panicking. Adrenaline is coursing through her body. Once she had gotten bitten, it must have been shocking because you never expect that to happen. No one ever expects that to happen. You think it's always going to happen to someone else. But I can tell you from experience, when it happens, it's like having two red-hot needles jammed into your skin and having somebody hit your hand with a sledgehammer. Whilst being rushed into the emergency room, Alexandria Hall still had the presence of mind to tell her doctors what had bitten her. So we knew that she had at least had one urutu in her home, which is not a terribly large snake from South America, and in fact, their bites are not considered that dangerous. There's a fairly low mortality rate, so survivability from one of those bites is generally fairly high. But of course, in Brazil, there's antivenom for that species. You don't generally find it up here in the States. The hospital treated her with a generic snake antivenom and did what they could to keep her alive. This Kentucky zoo is home to over a thousand of the most venomous snakes in the world. Jim Harrison has been running it for 20 years. Most of the people historically, recently, who've been killed by the animals have crossed the line of thinking that they know what the animals are going to do, and they don't. We never know exactly what the animal's going to do. So as far as, you know, my feelings towards animals is that I respect the animal, and I think that a lot of people from the outside look at snakes as being dangerous based on the biblical, you know, connotations of the serpent. It does seem that a lot of the fear of reptiles is learnt as part of our culture. My mother, you know, she would always say, stay away from snakes, you know, they're dangerous, they'll kill you. So you get that sort of drilled into your head growing up. All kids do, most kids do. And then you go to church, if you happen to be Christian and you hear the story about Adam and Eve and this evil snake that gave, you know, I think it was the apple of knowledge to Eve. So you have that whole component built into it. So things are sort of set up that way. The thrill of being close to the forbidden makes the museum popular with tourists. But they are purely there to subsidize its real purpose, to produce the anti-venom that can save victims of snake attacks. Every day, Jim Harrison takes his life in his hands to milk the venom from the fangs of deadly snakes. I average 600 to 1,000 extractions a week. It's a numbers game, eventually you're going to mess up. One of my friends said you have to be perfect six days a week, three hours a day, and nobody's perfect. This snake is a viper, the breed that had bitten Alexandria Hall. Should I be at risk because somebody else was doing something stupid? I can't let somebody die. It's just not in my personality. I look at it from a Bushido standpoint. Every morning I wake, I expect to die and I face death with honor. So if I'm doing something to save lives, it's worth doing it. Harrison has risked his life numerous times and bears the scars. The middle finger of my left hand I lost to a desert horned viper from Saudi Arabia about 20 years ago. I was bitten and the venom destroyed the tissue of the finger. I dissected it and the bone was actually dissolved by the venom. On the same hand, I have two fingers, the pinky finger and the finger next to it, that are damaged from a bite from a western diamondback rattlesnake. People who are handling the animals don't realize that when you come in contact with them, a wild animal, it's going to protect itself. A snake, for instance, has no arms to push you away, so it's only way of defending itself is to bite. The snake's bite releases venom, a modified form of saliva. It takes effect in various ways. This venom is the type that Alexandria Hall's viper injected into her bloodstream. It's a hemotoxin, which acts directly on the blood. It's a procoagulant, so it consumes all the clotting factors and it just basically turns it into a gelatin type thing. If this was in a person, what would happen is it consumes all the clotting factors and then eventually you start bleeding out. So even though it's a procoagulant that causes you to clot, it's taking all the clotting factors away. The congealing blood can cause blood clots to spread throughout the victim's body. As the red blood cells clump together in a solid mass, another danger presents itself. You got bit by a snake? The thin blood serum that remains can leak out through any weakness in the walls of blood vessels. Hang in there. And if you have an area where there's an aneurysm or there's a weakness in a vessel, it's going to start bleeding out there. And from what we know, she bled out into the brain. Alexandria Hall was able to tell doctors how she was bitten, but after that she lost consciousness. Within two days she was dead from a brain hemorrhage. It took about three days from the point she was bitten until she died. She didn't give the police very much information. She was apparently estranged from her family, so they had no next of kin information for this young woman, and they had no idea what was in the home. Their fear was that the animal that killed Alexandria Hall was still loose in her house. When Alexandria Hall died, the police were left to discover what she was keeping behind closed doors. No one was home. The house was completely locked up. All the shades were drawn. So from there we called the zoo. And these guys showed up wearing short-sleeved shirts, shorts, and a bent golf club to wrangle the snakes. When you go someplace like the Amazon to collect reptiles, you have a sense of what you're going to find. When you walk into a home where someone's keeping a large, diverse collection of animals, you really have no idea what you're going to encounter. There were lots of clothes and boxes lying around everywhere. I gathered that she was in the process of packing to move. So I picked up the first large box with the idea of carrying that into the living room where we would have a little bit more space. And as I lifted the box up, up popped a monocled cobra. So I set that down quickly. He came out and said that there's a lot of things in here you need to see. When we went in the room, he was showing me the various snakes, pointing out this one's very deadly, that one's very deadly. And it was just a little creepy to see all these slithery things everywhere. As they began to clear the house, they found a remarkable collection. Among them was a western diamond-backed rattlesnake, one of the deadliest in the world, two urutu pit vipers, two rhinoceros vipers, a gaboon viper, six lizards, and two caiman alligators. But the question still remained. Who was Alexandria Hall? And what drove her to amass this deadly collection? Fellow reptile fanatic Winston Card recognized something familiar in her. You tend to get interested in reptiles because they're different. And it has a lot to do with your ego. It has more to do with ego than it does necessarily your intrinsic interest in the animals. That comes later. And then you tend to get obsessed with it. And she appeared to be on that path. But it wasn't until reports of her death appeared in the local papers that details of who she was emerged. I read an article in a paper about an unnamed woman who had been bitten by a venomous snake. And she had had ten snakes and all these other animals. And I thought, I said to my wife, you know, that sounds like something my ex-wife would do. Dan Hall had been married to Alexandria for six years. They divorced in 1990, long before she'd begun collecting reptiles. She was pretty obsessive-compulsive with everything she did. She wanted a cat. And so, OK, we got her a cat. And by the time the marriage was over, we had ten cats in the house. She decided she was going to get into bodybuilding. Well, next thing you know, the spare room's a gym. She wanted a tattoo. Next thing you know, she had ten tattoos. No matter what she collected, it could have been anything. She would have moved on to something else and still not been happy. Well, current research has certainly shown that there is a high prevalence of obsessive-compulsive disorder in most animal hoarding cases, or in a high prevalence of them. A high proportion of, usually women, are often living alone and single at the point in life where what they call adult-onset animal hoarding comes on. I can understand the mindset. I can't understand the recklessness of just allowing stuff to wander around. I think some of the fascination with the venomous stuff with people is that people want to have power over that which can kill them. Yeah, well, that's why she wanted the guns. She wanted the danger of owning the guns. The problem with that, though, is she bought all these weapons and had never fired a weapon in her entire life, yet she felt this power from owning them, even though she knew nothing about them. She was this little sheltered girl from some Midwestern town in Indiana who never made it out on her own until she was 23. She just wanted to get away from it all and break out and make a name for herself somehow, and I guess she has. The snake that killed Alexandria Hall is on display in Cincinnati Zoo, and one of her pet cobras is now owned by Jim Harrison, being used to produce antivenom to help prevent another such tragedy. Somebody will call me up and they'll say, Am I in over my head? Well, if you ask me if I'm in over your head, you're in over your head. That's just a fact. I don't have to really even explain that to them. I just tell them, if you're asking me that question, then you know you're in over your head. But how did people like Alexandria Hall and Ronald Huff acquire pets that are so dangerous? Pet stores such as those run by Mark Amie in Hertfordshire, England, are completely aware of the dangers that these animals can present. For that reason, he does his best never to allow any customer to become overwhelmed by what their pet can grow into. On your first visit, we'll go through and show you how big an adult's going to be, how large of an enclosure it's going to require, how many years it's going to live for. It's going to need special lighting, special heating, special environment, special diet, special supplements. If they don't know these things, I'm not going to sell them it. He sees these animals as being as potentially dangerous as guns or drugs. And to help those owners who cannot cope, he's chosen to turn his home into a refuge. The first rattlesnake that came to me and started things off was found in a garage. It's something that I didn't think I would have to do. I always thought there was facilities that did these sort of things. Zoos are not interested in taking on the odd venomous snake. So the only option that these people have, that we're keeping dangerous wild animals, is to euthanise or try and find a facility that will actually take it. And there is no facility, so I've had to create that facility. It's such a large collection that we have here. Meerkats were handed in to the store. These are very destructive, we don't want them anymore. So we took those on. I've got skunks, I've got monkeys, I've got owls, I've got falcons. I've even got ferrets, pigs. And a whole array of tortoises. And obviously last but not least is the crocodile at the end of the garden. Despite the best intentions of pet shop owners like Mark Aimey, he can't stop those who are determined to get hold of these animals. Reptile fairs can make it easy. The ham fair in Germany is the biggest. There are hundreds of stallholders selling every imaginable type of reptile. This undercover footage was gathered by the Animal Protection Agency. You could literally walk through those doors and purchase anything that you want. Have a look and see a little cobra on the table there. Think, oh, I like the look of that. Or have a look, a little rattlesnake. Hand over your money and they'll sell it to you. But Hall and Huff were two individuals at the fringes of society. They needed another source of pets to allow them to indulge their hobby in total privacy. But going underground meant they had absolutely no support should something go wrong. At the time of her death, there were laws in Alexandria Hall's hometown to prevent her owning or possessing snakes. But, isolating herself at home, it was simply a matter of having them delivered to her front door. In fact, she had purchased a large quantity of these snakes and reptiles from a supplier in Florida. And it was pretty crazy. They came in a box, a wooden box, constructed, homemade, and it had a skull and crossbones painted on it. It said, warning, venomous reptile, and had air holes drilled in it. I didn't think I wanted to be the delivery man who would receive that package and have to deliver it. You got bit by a snake? Snake bite. Alexandria Hall was ill-equipped to cope with the animals in her care. But she was not the only one who obtained her pets outside the system. Ron would order them through mail order companies. He knew that a studio apartment would never get the permit to have these exotic animals. And he would have them usually shipped to his grandmother's house. He was on the first floor, right next to the sidewalk. He did keep his blinds drawn. I think he was a little nervous, maybe, about neighbors knowing how large the lizards were that were actually living in his house. Hough's body had deteriorated so badly by the time of the coroner's investigation that the report was inconclusive about the cause of death. But slowly, the detectives tried to piece together what had happened. The problem was that lizards don't present the obvious danger of a venomous snake. But they do have a unique method of attacking their prey, and the benefit of being incredibly patient. The most famous example of all is the Komodo dragon. Their technique is to bite the victim, and then wait for the infection to disable the animal. As they wait patiently, they will bite again and again. Eventually, the animal will die, and then they move in to eat their prey. In domestic reptiles, Salmonella is just one possible serious bacterial infection. Predators, whether they're mammals or whether they're reptiles, tend to have a fairly heavy bacteria load in their mouths, just like people do. If you're bitten by a monitor, and you don't tend to the wound, you're almost certain to get a fairly serious infection. He had been bitten several times, and not sought medical attention, knowing full well the bacteria that these lizards carried in their mouths. Ron wrote everything off, that he knew what he was doing, he was very well educated when it came to the care of these lizards, so he felt confident that he would be fine. Rather than be kept in their cages, the larger lizards roamed freely around his apartment, spreading bacteria as they went. It seems as Ronald Huff became closer to his pets, he began to live with them in ways that put himself at risk of infection and bites. And further investigation began to uncover evidence that Huff had been bitten just days before his death. To Huff, it was another harmless bite that he was sure he could overcome. He showed us the wound on a Friday, and it was in fact Monday when he was supposed to return to work. A picture was emerging of what might have happened to Ron Huff. For a loner like him, the weekend would not be a time to socialize. There was no one to miss him, as it seemed an infection from the cut spread through his body. In the past he had been strong enough to fight off infections, but by the time he realized the symptoms were overtaking him, it could have been too late. Huff had no telephone. He was isolated and trapped. Hours could have passed without him able to ask for help. It seems Ron Huff was a victim of the natural instincts of his pets. They were wild animals, and whatever he thought could never be tamed. The first bite might have been bad luck on Huff's part, but now he was defenseless. His lizards wouldn't have eaten for days. By the time the police found his body, Huff had not been at work for five days. Ron Huff's death was gruesome, but to those that understood him, it seems to have come about because he was more concerned for the welfare of his pets than himself. If Ron had left his apartment to seek medical attention and was not able to get back into his apartment to care for his animal for days, it might cause the animals to perish, and we know that that's not something Ron would have wanted. His care and concern for his animals seemed to be at times above his own welfare, and we believe that in some way him sacrificing himself for his animals would have been what he would have wanted. Ron Huff is an extreme example of a person whose natural love of animals can become dysfunctional. He was brought down by self-imposed isolation due to his devotion to his lizards, a relationship that ultimately led to his death. The same appears to be true of Alexandria Hall. Having broken away from family and friends, her love of animals became an obsession with lethal pets. Her death had a tragic inevitability. The thing of it is, though, if she would have called, I would have went out there, you know. No matter what happened, I still would have went out there. No one wants to die alone.