New Petition Reignites Effort to Remove Tigers From Denver's Downtown Aquarium

Kylie Bates spent sixty days in jail walking in circles on a concrete floor.

She was arrested in Kansas last December after refusing to stop when a cop tried to pull her over for speeding, Bates says. The chase ended with police spike-stripping her car and Bates behind bars. As the weeks in confinement slowly passed, she paced back and forth, unable to feel the sun or touch the grass, and her mind kept returning to one thing: tigers.

The tigers in Denver's Downtown Aquarium. Two years before she was locked up, while in college in Fort Collins, Bates tried to write a class essay on the living conditions of the tigers in the aquarium, which has been criticized for years over the animals' small, indoor, rocky enclosure. Bates says the aquarium stonewalled her when she tried to get information, so she wrote her paper on the orcas at SeaWorld instead. But now, she felt she knew firsthand what those tigers experience.

"When I get out of jail, I'm all in," Bates told herself. "I have to do something."

Now, Bates has started an online petition demanding that the two Sumatran tigers in the aquarium be relocated to a wildlife sanctuary. The petition has garnered over 300 signatures since it went live on February 16.

"My mental health was just downing [in jail]. I know this is exactly how animals feel when they're held in captivity," says Bates, who now lives in Denver. "I felt trapped. I was depressed. There were times when I didn't want to eat, I didn't want to do anything. I felt so helpless and controlled."

She's not the first person to fight to re-home the tigers. In 2021, another petition calling for the tigers to be moved to a sanctuary got over 3,300 signatures. In 2016, a petition started by two twelve-year-old girls in Colorado Springs collected a whopping 196,000 signatures. That petition was still active as of ten months ago, with one of the girls, now an adult living in New York, posting: "Please, continue to sign and share this petition, and I will work on a plan for what to do with this."

None of these efforts has resulted in any change for the tigers.

Jim Prappas, director of animal operations for the company that owns the aquarium, says the tigers are well taken care of, adding that the aquarium is also "actively consulting" on potential enhancements to the tiger exhibit.

"We take great pride in caring for our animals," Prappas says. "We have not had a single failed state or federal inspection throughout nearly twenty years the tiger facility has been in operation. We employ a full-time, certified team of twenty animal biologists and three veterinarians with over 55 years of zoo and aquarium experience who monitor our cats 365 days a year."
The Downtown Aquarium has been owned by Landry’s, a Texas restaurant company, since 2003, when Landry’s bought what was originally known as Colorado’s Ocean Journey. The facility initially centered around the journey of two rivers to the ocean — one through North America, one through Asia, which explains why tigers were there in the first place.

Half a dozen aquarium employees told Westword in 2022 that the company wasn't adequately caring for its animals. One described the tigers’ off-exhibit area, where the animals are taken for sun and fresh air, as “a kennel.” That employee said staff had requested improvements to the tiger exhibit, but corporate denied the request.

Another Landry’s-owned aquarium has received similar complaints. The Animal Legal Defense Fund sued Landry’s over its Houston aquarium in 2017, claiming that its tiger enclosures didn’t meet Endangered Species Act standards. Landry’s countersued for defamation. Both parties settled in 2021, following a $4 million exhibit expansion for the tigers in 2019.

The Denver aquarium is accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the Zoological Association of America and American Humane, Prappas says, all nonprofit animal welfare organizations that accredit facilities that meet their standards. In 2022, two sources told Westword they submitted complaints to the AZA about the treatment of the stingrays and tigers in the Downtown Aquarium, but they never got a response.

The two tigers that currently live at the aquarium were placed there by the AZA's Species Survival Plan Programs.

"The [Species Survival Plan] decides the disposition of these animals," Prappas says. "The conditions of the exhibit are perfect for this species.”

Pat Craig, executive director of the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg, disagrees. He says the noisy, echoey aquarium exhibit filled almost entirely with rock and gravel is a "very unnatural environment" for the tigers. "We obviously don't see eye to eye when it comes to that kind of environment," he says.

"I don't think any animal should be in captivity like that," Craig adds. "It's not exactly great, but the problem is, they're not out of compliance. It's really tough. At that point, public pressure is the only way to get [the tigers] out of there."
The Keenesburg animal sanctuary is 1,214 acres and houses more than 520 tigers, lions, bears, wolves and other large carnivores, according to its website. The rehabilitated animals previously held in captivity are able to roam freely in the extremely large habitats, to simulate their natural wild environments as closely as possible, Craig says.

Craig says his sanctuary has agreed to take in the tigers if they are relocated from the aquarium. However, he says the decision is likely up to the AZA, not Landry’s.

While the tigers have been a staple of the aquarium for years, not all visitors are happy about it. Dozens of Yelp reviews for the aquarium — even ones giving positive overall scores — lament the tiger exhibit.

"I feel sorry for some of the larger animals that are in small enclosures. Why do they have a tiger at an aquarium?" one reviewer wrote in July. "The tiger actually looked depressed. It made me sad," wrote another in June. "We saw a tiger in a VERY small cage. It was so upsetting to see such a beautiful animal treated like that," read a review from March.

All of these complaints are met with the same response from the aquarium: "We can assure you all of our animals are well taken care of, and the tigers, fish and stingrays are in great health."

The Downtown Aquarium has held strong in the face of repeated efforts to end its tiger exhibit. But while the previous petitions didn't work out, Bates says she's determined to see hers through to the end. She is also planning to stage protests at the aquarium, collect signatures in person, write about the tigers' living conditions and contact state politicians about the issue.

"I'm not going to give up," Bates says. "Things are going to change this year. It takes one person to make a ripple in a pond. I want to be that person."