There may be more captive tigers in the US than wild ones in the rest of the world. But in states like Texas that bristle at government interference, no-one really knows how many are being kept as pets.
Taj was a four-month-old tiger cub when purchased at a Texas truck stop by the driver of an 18-wheeler lorry. But after Taj began tearing up the truck's cab, the driver contacted Austin Zoo to get the animals off his hands. The zoo now looks after the fully grown 17-year-old Bengal tiger male.
Taj is one of as many as 7,000 tigers living in the US either in zoos or privately owned, according to some estimates. That's nearly double the estimated 3,890 tigers still prowling in the wild around the world.
Many of America's tigers could be in people's backyards as pets, and often aren't registered, especially in states like Texas. No-one really knows just how many tigers there are out there.
At the heart of this surprising tiger turnout is the very American notion of a God-given right to do one's own thing, including owning a pet - no matter how exotic - being an individual liberty that the state should not mess with.
"A man came up to me and called me a communist," Ben Callison, a former animal sanctuary director and animal welfare activist, describes the reaction after he addressed a US Agricultural Department conference on the problems with exotic pets. "People say you are trying to take away their rights to own what they want, and do what they want."
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