Where the Wild Things Are

Dave Kinner's car screeched to a halt minutes before midnight outside a compact two-story house in Buckland, a speck of a Western Massachusetts town. The state environmental police officer and a colleague joined local police already at the home of Kenneth Billiel, whose live-in girlfriend had called the cops complaining of domestic abuse. Billiel, the woman had told local officers, was home, but she warned them not to go in.

In the darkness, Kinner tapped at a first-floor window, and two dogs began barking inside. He backed away and shined a powerful spotlight on a curtainless second-floor window. The ragged face of a black bear peered down at him. Billiel had secretly raised her for almost a year in his home. He named her Bella. Kinner, who knew how powerful even a young bear can be, called for backup.

Billiel, a 47-year-old construction worker, would make Bella corn muffins every morning. She'd get a bath once a week. And maybe it was the soap or some combination of her own odor and shampoo, but, Billiel says, she always smelled like graham crackers afterward. Billiel admits he would ignore his girlfriend and her kids after work and rush upstairs to find Bella, whom he doted on as if she were a child. The bear would wrestle with him on the carpet. She would cover him like a blanket on the couch when he napped. And late at night, when none of the neighbors could see, Billiel would slip a blue leash around Bella's neck and teach her how to climb trees.

It has been more than 19 months since Kinner came upon Bella at Billiel's house. He and two other wildlife officers needed five hours to get the agitated bear out of the house. They shot five tranquilizer darts in her, but she only grew fiercer as daylight approached. Billiel waited nearby, handcuffed, in a police cruiser. "That plump little lady dragged us all over the house," Kinner remembers. Finally, after using two snare poles to corner Bella, the officers pushed her into a cage and loaded it into the back of Kinner's cruiser. In his 13-year career, Kinner has worked on scores of cases of humans raising exotic or native wild animals as pets, but he's never heard of someone keeping an unrestrained bear at home as long as Billiel did. Billiel was charged with domestic abuse against his girlfriend and harboring a wild animal without a license, charges that were expected to be heard earlier this month. He hasn't stopped hoping he'll get Bella back - and yearns to find out where she is today.

Raising exotic or native animals is a hidden and often illegal hobby, but wildlife officials and animal advocates say it's on the rise. The practice often makes headlines when the result is deadly; in the last two years alone, pet tigers in New York and North Carolina killed a boy and mauled a girl and a man. US Department of Agriculture officials, concerned about the increase in "nontraditional pets," hosted a first-of-its kind meeting in Kansas City last month with representatives from 42 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C., which produced a list of recommendations to better police, track, and inspect the animals.

A quick Internet search turns up a Noah's ark of species for sale, from tigers and bob-cats to birds and giant lizards, some captured in the wild, others bred in captivity. Some pets stumble into their new owners' hands. In New England, populations of deer, coyote, and bear have ballooned in the last 15 years. At the same time, development has pushed into more rural areas, where many of these animals live. Young animals have not yet learned to fear people. Older animals become brazen as they forage for food around homes. Some people believe any baby animal they see must be injured or orphaned and scoop it up. Others become so enamored with a wild animal that they try to make it into a house pet.

Whether it's exotic animals or native ones, the Massachusetts Environmental Police say they have noticed an increase in the number of complaints about people keeping wild animals as pets in the last five years. "For every one [complaint] that you get, there are 10 you don't get," says Anthony Abdal-Khabir, an officer with the environmental police. His department started a task force last year to better communicate with state and federal agencies that might come across cases of illegal pet ownership.

Most of these pets' stories end tragically for the animals, as they are fed the wrong food or placed in an unfamiliar climate. The Humane Society of the United States says most people are unaware of how to care for exotic or native wild animals, and many die soon after being taken in. Those that survive often become nature's misfits. They are too tame to be put back into the wild, but they remain far too wild to stay in anyone's home. While some find haven in sanctuaries, there is no place for the vast majority to go, and most, in the end, are put to death.

There is no outrage. State officials are scratching their heads, looking for ways to educate the public about improper pets and how to catch people who take in the animals illegally. Meanwhile, creature lovers looking for more exciting pets continue to hunger for wild animals. This growing eagerness to domesticate bears and leash tigers only highlights the deepening chasm between the natural world and our own.

The Northeastern University underclassman did everything legally, that is, until he had the baby bobcat airmailed to Massachusetts last summer and began raising it in his high-rise dorm room - where even house kittens are banned. The student, from the South Shore, bought the wild animal for $1,000 off the Internet from a Minnesota company. He even had a veterinarian clear the animal for travel to Massachusetts. Then, he secretly tended to the bobcat, uncaged and still clawed, with the help of his three roommates.

But while bobcats can be legally bred in Minnesota and, until last year, kept as pets there, Massachusetts prohibits both practices. One cool September morning, environmental police, who had discovered a record of the animal's entry into the state, seized the cub while the student was at class. Environmental police and Northeastern officials won't release the student's name; they say he's paid his penance. But his ease in buying the bobcat highlights a loophole-laden patchwork of state and local laws that makes it legal, for instance, to own an alligator in Rhode Island but not in Massachusetts. That inconsistency, coupled with the secrecy in which many people raise nontraditional pets, makes it impossible to accurately count how many are kept in homes. Police say the only reason they caught the student so quickly is that an employee of the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture came across the Minnesota veterinarian's authorization giving the bobcat a clean bill of health to fly to Massachusetts. Noting that the bobcat owner gave a residential address, not that of a zoo, authorities figured the animal might be illegal. After spending six months at the Wildlife Clinic at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University in Grafton, the 13-pound animal was sent to Charmingfare Farm in Candia, New Hampshire, in March. Tufts picked up the $2,500 cost for the bobcat's time at the clinic.

Massachusetts has some of the most restrictive laws in the country for wild and exotic pets, yet it is surrounded by states that don't. New Hampshire, like Rhode Island, allows alligators. New York State allowed people to keep tigers until this year, because no law specifically banned them. Fifteen states have no ban on keeping bears, large reptiles, or wildcats, although an entry permit may be required, according to the Animal Protection Institute, a California-based advocacy group that is lobbying states to pass more restrictive laws.

Environmental police officers in New England states don't pretend they have control over the situation: Short-staffed, with dozens of other duties, they say they often hear about illegal animals only when local police go to houses for other reasons, such as in Billiel's case. And they say it is almost impossible to stop people from bringing wild animals into the state.

Any busy day at Regal Reptiles in Providence illustrates the problem. A 10-minute drive from the Massachusetts border, the 15,000-square-foot exhibition space and store is devoted to scores of species of lizards, frogs, spiders, snakes, turtles, and alligators - including many that are banned in Massachusetts. If customers say where they are from, clerks won't sell them a species that is banned in their state. Mostly, though, it's a "don't ask, don't tell" transaction.

On a recent visit, dozens of children squealed as they petted giant tortoises and watched staff members feed the alligators. Owner Shawn Fay complains that ever-changing laws make it difficult for him to run trade shows in different states, because it takes so much time to research what animals he can bring. He favors one federal law to oversee the keeping of wild and exotic animals, although his ideas about such legislation are far more permissive than what animal-rights advocates want.

Billiel was raking leaves at his Buckland home when, he says, Bella found him. On a brilliant autumn day in 2002, Billiel saw a puff of black fur out of the corner of his eye. Goaded by a pack of crows, it inched across the fallen leaves toward him. Billiel picked up the kitten-sized bear - at most 4 days old, according to his estimates - and brought her indoors. Bella made terrible noises those first few days. She moaned. She screeched. Billiel would hug her to his chest to comfort her and still she was restless, always looking out the window. Twice Bella's mother came looking for her, sniffing around the back of the house. "But she saw Bella was OK," Billiel says, and didn't come back a third time.

Some animal-rights advocates paint owners of wild animals as a heartless bunch, too uncaring to let nature take its course and so egotistical as to think they can provide a home equal to, or better than, the wild. The truth is often far more complicated. A spectrum of emotions drives ownership, including kindness and loneliness. Some owners do see their animals as decorative property. But others feel a kinship to their pet. One woman visiting Regal Reptiles over the winter said she takes care of captive-bred venomous snakes because they are so unloved by the public.

Paul Waldau, director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts, says wild-pet ownership can stem from a deep lack of understanding about the natural world, a phenomenon he calls "misplaced goodness." "People think by acquiring these animals, they are doing them a favor," he says. For others, animals fit a trend, as with the Vietnamese potbellied pig craze years ago. "You get an arrogance and dramatic ignorance," Waldau says, adding animals can cause real harm to humans if they maul them or pass on a disease. But he mostly worries that by adopting and confining inappropriate animals, we are "teaching our children some really terrible, terrible habits toward the nonhuman world."

Yet Billiel is sure of his role as savior. Bella would have died if he hadn't taken her in those first few days, he says. Divorced, Billiel has lived in the same house for 23 years. Inside, a bear Billiel once killed is mounted in an alcove above the kitchen table. The contradiction is not lost on him. Yes, he used to hunt bears, he explains. But now, after knowing Bella, he wouldn't kill one.

Bears have always fascinated Billiel, and he long dreamed of raising one. His son, Keith, who died at age 13 in 1994 when a black-powder musket that a family friend was loading accidentally discharged, was also enamored of bears. When Bella suddenly appeared in front of him, Billiel says, he couldn't help but feel Keith had some strange comforting hand in it all. "I didn't go looking for this animal," Billiel says, arms outstretched at his kitchen table. "She came to me." His voice trails off. "I love that bear."

Wildlife officials are not impressed with Billiel's reasoning. Every time they confiscate a wild animal, they say there is a story, an excuse. They have a far different take on Billiel - selfishness. "You have to know you shouldn't keep a bear in your house," says Kinner.

Billiel says that as Bella grew, it became clear he couldn't keep her forever, but as the months slipped by, he kept putting off her release. She was just too cute and playful. By month three, Bella began leaving claw marks on walls. By month six, she had punched a hole through one. Finally, Billiel built Bella a 6-foot-by-12-foot cage out of metal fencing in his bedroom. When he was gone, he would lock her up. But when he came home, Bella would be free to curl up on the couch and nose around the refrigerator.

Art Howell's job is to nurse injured native wildlife back to health at his sprawling Maine compound near the Canadian border and then to release them into the wild. Yet, some never leave. Instead, the former police officer has become the self-appointed guardian for a dozen or so native animals trapped between tame and wild, just like Bella. These animals live out their lives in cages down a dirt path in back of Howell's white house. Howell shows visitors Misty, a sullen 10-year-old coyote stolen out of her den as a baby. He unlatches a door and reveals Tiffany, a skittish deer with enormous eyes who was rescued from a Maine man's home. Nearby is a hyperactive red squirrel seized during a drug bust and a partially tame cougar that likes to rub, kitten-style, against Howell's legs. "They get imprinted by people," says Howell, 64. "But I feel like I have to take care of them."

Howell, a father of seven, moved his family to Amity in 1980 and started the A.E. Howell Wildlife Conservation Center soon after. Massachusetts and Maine wildlife officials praise the facility and regularly drop off fawns orphaned by cars, owls missing wings, and other misfits. Bella's here, too, living in a 30-foot-by-50-foot, $26,744 pen. Howell got some donations for it, but most of the cost, he says, was covered by a second mortgage on his home. Bella has a sleeping area and a big play yard with a log, a built-in swimming pool, and even a potential boyfriend named Baxter in the next cage.

Bella was dazed and fearful of humans in the first weeks after being removed from Billiel's home and taken to the Tufts Wildlife Clinic. Diagnosed with a genetic hip problem, Bella will probably need an operation in the next few years. With little to offer in the way of help until that time, the clinic staff gave her to Howell. Now a robust 140-pound bear, Bella will let only Howell pet her coarse black fur. She gets feisty quickly and climbs the walls of her cage. Howell feels it is important to play with Bella, but after she broke his wrist, he only goes into the open area of her cage with heavy gloves and a helper.

Howell knows Bella was saved mostly because her story is so bizarre and because he was able to provide a home for her, in part on his dime. Many other animals are routinely killed. At Providence's Regal Reptiles, an enormous pool is filled with more than 25 2- to 4-foot-long alligators, most abandoned by pet owners after they grew too big. Many will eventually be killed. The same goes for the dozens of raccoons, rabbits, deer, and chipmunks that well-intentioned families bring to animal-care workers in shelters and clinics every year. There aren't enough places to care for them. Plus, any animal that can harbor rabies and comes in contact with humans is killed; the only way to accurately test for the disease is by examining the animal's brain. "It's hard for us, it's not their fault, and they are cute," says Flo Tseng, assistant director for the Tufts Wildlife Clinic who helped take care of Bella.

Billiel has heard these kinds of stories. And he knows he wasn't supposed to have Bella. Still, ever since police took the bear away that cold night, Billiel has been plotting ways to get her back. Walking around his tiny house, he's got a plan. He's going to get a wildlife rehabilitator's license and retrieve Bella. Then, no, he only wants to visit her to make sure she's OK. Until now, Billiel didn't know where Bella was.

Art Howell is ready if Billiel comes calling. He's a tough man - gun in hand, he recently chased after a trespasser in his bare feet and pajamas - and has double padlocks on Bella's cage. He has cameras trained on her at all times.

Still, Billiel is sure Bella is pining for him, as he is for her. "I know she will recognize me and I will recognize her," he says wistfully. "I saved Bella's life."

Beth Daley, the environment and space reporter for the Globe's Health/Science section, can be reached by e-mail at bdaley@globe.com.