Tiger, tiger

So just before we left in December, Katherine was telling us about the school bus having to stop or get rerouted or something because there was a tiger in someone’s back yard.

Ha-ha, we laughed.  At best, it was a mountain lion (interesting enough, to be sure), at worse, a mistold story repeated several times.

And then I looked at the local Centennial paper  …

It was the stuff of a zany television sitcom last week when a Centennial man was arrested after neighbors reported suspicions that he had been keeping a Bengal tiger in his suburban home.

Officers from the Colorado Division of Wildlife – with back-up from an Arapahoe County Sheriff’s SWAT team – removed the tiger Dec. 19 after conducting an all-day surveillance operation.

“When they called my office and said there was a report of Bengal tigers in Centennial – well, it’s hard to surprise me, but you can shock me with this,” Sheriff Grayson Robinson said. 

The kicker is that it was actually in our Foxridge neighborhood.  Yikes!

The Centennial tiger was first spotted last month when a tipster gave wildlife officials photos of someone driving the tiger around Centennial in an SUV. Later, some of Michael’s neighbors reported having seen the animal in the man’s backyard.

“I had noticed that their dogs had been out front a lot lately,” said a neighbor who asked not to be identified. “I’m kind of wondering if that might have had something to do with the tiger being inside.”

Children who live on the block had been over to play with the tiger at Michael’s house, according to neighborhood reports.

(Other coverage here)