Numerous potentially destructive items make it across the U.S.-Mexico border every day: prescription medications, illegal firearms, American college students. But there is perhaps nothing as potentially deadly as what Michelle Ashton of Calvert smuggled onto our soil and then attempted to sell in a Wal Mart parking lot.
I'll give you a second to guess.
Nope, you were wrong.
It was tigers. Unless you guessed tigers, in which case congratulations.
Ms. Ashton was caught negotiating the sale of four white and two orange Bengal tigers in first the Wal Mart, and then the Mervyn's parking lots in Calvert. I assume she moved when she realized Wal Mart’s Bengal Tiger Family 8-Pack was undercutting her profits by a healthy margin.
If your first question is who the hell she was selling the tigers to, then you’re clearly not an eleven year old boy, fun-loving but shortsighted father, or decadent mafia crime lord.
The question you
should be asking is what exactly she got arrested for. I mean, is it really illegal just to
have tiger cubs? Short answer: yes. Long answer: also yes, but only because she didn’t have a license to transport them.
Which got me to wondering what kind of application you’d fill out in order to obtain a license granting you the right to transport tiger cubs in cat carriers in the back of your truck. Luckily for me, I was able to look up and/or fabricate that information online.