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"FacebookPinterest\n\nDidn't the sight of lions and tigers and bears rampaging through the streets and azure forests of Zanesville, Ohio, kind of wrap up the year for you? This was the year of anarchy and chaos, of Wall Street protests and Arab uprisings, of Europanic and debt disasters, and, now, wild animals attacking our mildest states.\n\nIf you didn't see it, please open your iGoogles. As a cautious man finely attuned to the possibilities of carnage, I have certain default Google Alerts\u2014like \"rampaging animals\" and \"wild macaques on the loose\"\u2014which help me arrange my day. I get the early word when a mad chimpanzee is eating people's faces is what I'm saying, so I was practically waiting for this moment.\n\nO the insanity. This guy in Ohio had an entire compound full of rare and exotic creatures, which for puzzling, inhumane reasons, can easily be bought on the auction circuit (who knew they auctioned giraffes?) or, failing that, purchased directly from Mike Tyson. At the compound, there were apes in the living room, grizzly bears out back. It was like Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch except all the llamas were vicious tigers, and visiting children could be eaten rather than merely molested.\n\nWhat caused the rampage is, as of this writing, unclearish. Except that the guy had serious problems. He owed tens of thousands of dollars to the IRS and had had run-ins with the feds, who once raided his house and found piles of machine guns and sniper riffles stashed under the stairs (just a quick monkey-crawl away from that living room, I might add).\n\nHe was also not the kind of neighbor you'd stop by for a lawn chat. I guess one day he just went apeshit: In a suicidal move, he opened all the cages and cut the animals loose, free to terrify the citizens of Zanesville. Residents described a kind of Noah's-Ark-meets-the-Apocalypse scene. They heard howls in their backyards, swerved to avoid jungle cats on the highway. Cops moved in on the ranch and started slaughtering the beasts, including eighteen extremely rare Bengal tigers, made rarer now by the expert marksmanship of Muskingum County officials.\n\nHow many dead in Ohio? Reports varied. Some said forty-seven animals had perished, others fifty-seven, an unsettling gap in data right when you really need solid numbers. I'm convinced there's still a baboon out there. The crazy thing is that this hobby, having your own zoo or homeschooling animals, whatever you want to call it, is totally cool and unregulated in Ohio, because people hate regulations\u2014they kill jobs, haven't you heard? Think of all the jobs you could have if everyone were simply allowed to own packs of feral animals. You could have gainfully employed rifflemen posted on our nation's sidewalks and roadways, tranquilizing wild cougars and getting this economy moving again.\n\nSee, this is the kind of thing that makes a man step back and think: Maybe it's okay to have regulations for a few things. I know it's become a dirty word, the catch-all excuse for a sick economy, and one of the 9,473 things Rick Perry is fed up with (including verbs). Even Steve Jobs told Obama he'd be a one-term president if he didn't let Americans open up factories without so many rules, like they do in China, where they enjoy such pleasures as lead toys and a complete absence of sky. But watch: Chaos will soon come to China. Protests against horrible working and environmental conditions are literally in the air. So maybe this country needs to change the conversation. Don't call it regulations. Call it common sense, or vigilance. We used to have it. Otherwise you look around one day and there's a cheetah on the porch."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/jim-nelson-december-2011>