In the Memorial neighborhood, a tiger was spotted.
The cat was held at gunpoint by an off-duty sheriff’s deputy before another person came outside and was able to safely remove the cat.
On Sunday evening, a viewer sent us video of a tiger outside a home in Memorial.
The collared tiger was prowling around the front yard before someone came out of the house and took it inside.
According to Houston police, the incident occurred at approximately 8 p.m. on Ivy Wall Drive, near the intersection of Highway 6 and Memorial Drive.
In one of the videos, a man is seen in the front yard holding a gun and screaming at the person who was bringing the tiger inside. Later, it was determined that the man was an off-duty sheriff’s deputy.
“This is a tiger tale. I’m on the phone with the operator, who is a sergeant with the sheriff’s department, and he is restraining the owner, who is attempting to flee “According to audio recorded by Broadcastify, Houston police dispatchers said.
According to witnesses, the tiger was then loaded into a truck and driven away before the police arrived.
The deputy stressed that he was aiming his weapon at the cat and not at people in order to keep the neighborhood safe.
Neither charges nor additional details about Sunday evening’s tiger incident have been confirmed by police.
This is the second tiger sighting in Houston in the last couple of years. A tiger was discovered in an abandoned home in southeast Houston in February 2019 and was subsequently relocated to an unknown sanctuary in Texas.
In Texas, is it legal to own a tiger or other exotic cat?
Although tigers are not permitted in the City of Houston, they are permitted in unincorporated Harris County if their owners register the animals and adhere to a specific set of laws, which include maintaining $100,000 in animal insurance and securing the tiger at least 1,000 feet from another home, school, or child care facility.
Private possession of tigers and other “dangerous wild animals” is permitted in Texas, as long as applicants register with their local animal control or sheriff, send a copy of their paperwork to the state, and adhere to the state’s caging standards.
Additional strange animal sightings in our city
The tiger sighting on Sunday night is the latest in a series of rare animal sightings in southeast Texas in recent weeks. At the end of last month, traffic was slowed to a crawl on I-10 East due to a cow. It was finally wrangled and relocated safely.
Later that day, on the Fred Hartman Bridge, an alligator was spotted. It’s unclear how it got up there, but it was causing delays between La Porte and Baytown.
And then, a few days earlier, a resident of Willis captured this picture using his family’s Ring camera following a heavy storm.
