Canadian Tourist Convicted of Animal Cruelty After Mistaking Las Vegas Flamingo Habitat for a Gift Shop

SOMEWHERE ON THE LAKE — I have been fishing for a long time, and the most important thing I know has nothing to do with knots, lures or the weather. You leave the water the way you found it. If the thing in front of you is not yours to keep, it stays where it lives, and you go home with a story.

A Canadian tourist in Las Vegas has now learned a version of that rule from a jury.

In March, the man walked into the wildlife habitat at the Flamingo Las Vegas Hotel and Casino, took a Chilean flamingo named Peachy from her flock, and carried her up to his hotel room, the BBC and CBS reported. Security video shown at his trial caught him in the elevator with her. A jury needed about five hours to convict him on felony and misdemeanor animal abuse charges.

He testified that he had been up all night, had drunk 30 to 40 beers, and had just gotten off a call with a colleague when he decided it would be funny to take the bird. He said he never meant to hurt her.

Animal experts testified that Peachy had feathers torn out and lost blood. A state veterinarian said she has largely recovered, but she is now more anxious around people. There is no joke in that paragraph. Peachy did nothing wrong except live somewhere a tourist could reach.

The Strip’s one honest deal

Here is what gets me. Las Vegas will sell you a gondola ride inside a shopping mall, a volcano that erupts on a schedule and an Eiffel Tower at half size. The whole city is built so that visitors never have to take anything real home with them. Every gift shop on the Strip has a plastic flamingo, a flamingo shot glass and a flamingo T-shirt in your size.

The habitat at the Flamingo is free to walk through. It holds a flock of Chilean flamingos, other birds, turtles and fish. It may be the one honest deal on that stretch of road: real animals, standing in real water, asking nothing of you but that you look and keep walking.

Somewhere between beer 30 and beer 40, a grown man looked at all of that and picked the one thing that was alive.

I have made bad calls after a long night. I once tied a frog lure on in January. I once spent four hours casting at a log I was sure was a fish. But every bad call I have ever made ended the same way: me looking foolish, and the fish swimming off fine. That is the order it is supposed to go in.

The verdict, and the long stay

His lawyer told the jury it was meant as a harmless prank and blamed the alcohol. “He made bad decisions,” the lawyer said, which is the most accurate thing anyone has said about a weekend in Las Vegas in some years.

He faces nearly five years in prison. He has been unable to leave the United States since his arrest and remains on house arrest in Las Vegas, with sentencing set for December. So the trip that was supposed to last a weekend has now run about seven months, and he still does not get to take anything home.

Catch and release

I have seen Big Doris twice. She is the biggest fish on this lake, and both times she was close enough that I could have tried something stupid. Both times I watched her turn and go back down into the weeds, and I sat in the boat for a while feeling lucky to have been there at all.

That is the whole sport, if you do it right. You show up, you look, you let it be. The thing you came to see is still there next year, for the next person.

Peachy is back with her flock, standing in shallow water, which is what she was doing before any of this started. I hope the people walking past give her a little more room now. I hope they look, and keep walking. I am going back out for Big Doris in the morning, and if I find her, I already know how it ends.