NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York man who kept a pet tiger in his Harlem apartment pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a charge of reckless endangerment but pledged to try and get the animal back.Antoine Yates, 31, kept a 400-pound Siberian-Bengal tiger called Ming in his seven-room apartment last October.
"A tiger is a wild animal as a matter of law," Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Budd Goodman said in accepting the plea just as a jury was being chosen in the case.
"If it's not a habitat, if it's not a lab, if it's not a circus, then you can't have a wild animal," Goodman said.
The judge indicated Yates would probably receive a sentence of no more than six months in jail and that probation was possible. Sentencing was set for Sept. 16.
Yates, a part-time taxi driver, told reporters he accepted the deal in part because similar charges against his 70-year-old mother would be dropped.
"I never thought I put the public in harm's way," he said, weeping, after the hearing. "If I have to do six months, I will do it but I will be back. I'm going to try to get Ming back."
Ming was shipped to an animal refuge in Ohio after authorities found the animal in the apartment.
