Former circus performer, Edinburg resident faces animal cruelty charges

Barbara Hoffman vowed last year to pack up and leave Edinburg for a city more appreciative of her menagerie of wild cats and other exotic animals.

Jefferson, Texas — as it turns out — wasn’t that place.

Two weeks after the retired circus performer moved her 60-animal collection into the rural town on the state’s border with Louisiana, authorities seized them all and placed her and her business partner under arrest on charges of animal cruelty.

Now, the fate of six tigers, three black leopards, one cougar, a wallaby, a monkey, and a host of cats, dogs, lizards, turtles and horses lies in a courtroom again.

"It’d be fine if she got all of her licenses," said Larry Nance, an investigator for the Marion County District Attorney’s Office. "But she just moved in here in the dead of night without the proper permits, and we’re not going to keep pushing this problem down the road."

In January 2009, Edinburg city officials gave Hoffman, 58, and partner Fred Lulling until the end of the year to remove their animals from an 8-acre tract of land just outside of city limits.

The business partners had failed to register the animals with the city, state or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and they posed a danger to public safety, a city spokeswoman said at the time. The pair attempted to appeal that decision in court, but their lawsuit was thrown out after a judge found they had not filed it in a timely fashion.

But Hoffman — who toured in a traveling circus act for more than two decades — maintained she was more than capable of caring for such wild beasts and merely wanted to open an educational wildlife preserve for children and Winter Texans. She had previously kept them at the San Benito fairgrounds before Hurricane Dolly made the area unsafe, prompting her move to Hidalgo County.

"These aren’t pets," she told The Monitor last year. "They’re burdens. But they’re also something I’ve given my whole life to take care of, and I know what I’m doing with them."

Investigators in Marion County — of which Jefferson is the county seat — disagreed.

"We got a complaint from one of her neighbors saying they heard some roaring," said Nance, the district attorney’s investigator. "This was just down the road from a day care."

On Jan. 27, authorities from at least eight agencies raided Hoffman’s Jefferson property and found the animals in deplorable conditions, said Marion County Humane Society President Caroline Wedding, whose organization has taken temporary custody of the menagerie.

Several were kept in small cages inside three trailers that reeked of ammonia and urine. Hoffman and Lulling were living in one of the RVs along with about a dozen cats, a sugar glider, three guinea pigs, several birds, four boa constrictors and mice in every room, authorities said.

The duo’s collection of large cats remained housed in a group of travel trailers, but Hoffman told the Marshall News Messenger that her lion had died from "stress" en route from Edinburg.

"The tears running down our faces when we saw all those animals," Wedding said. "I don’t see how she lived in there with them, but I really don’t see how those animals were surviving."

A Marion County judge is expected to rule Thursday on whether to permanently take the animals away from Hoffman and Lulling, who remained jailed as of late Tuesday evening on $30,000 bonds.

While hopeful his client could beat the criminal charges, Lulling’s attorney Bruce Abraham all but conceded the fight for their animals was probably lost.

"Some people just don’t want big cats in their community," he said.