Wild at Heart

VIDRINE -- The sound of a car horn, and the repeated pushing of his door bell, awakened Mike Lafleur from his sleep in the middle of the night.
It was around 2 o’clock in the morning some years ago, Lafleur’s neighbor was traveling back from work and had spotted some of Lafleur’s livestock roaming the grounds of the old Vidrine High School.
So Lafleur got dressed, grabbed a bucket of feed and he and his wife got in their van and drove down the road to retrieve his animals. There Lafleur found his escapees but these animals weren’t the typical breeds most identify with a farm. There were no cows or horses at the school that night.
For Lafleur his livestock consisted of a water buffalo, a Watusis (exotic cattle), a large goat and a llama.
“I got out at that school and shook the bucket of feed,” Mike said. “They all came to eat out of the bucket. So I started walking down the highway at 2 a.m. and the animals, and my wife in the van, followed me down the road back to the farm.”
Lafleur has had a passion for animals, and exotic animals, ever since he was a small child. Even though his family lived in the Ville Platte city limits, his father raised pigeons, chickens and dogs in the backyard.
“My daddy raised animals all of his life,” Mike said. “He never raised exotics but I walked into our pigeon cage as soon as I could walk.”
Lafleur’s passion for exotic animals began as a child as he began collecting and raising parakeets. That hobby carried over to when he got married to his late first wife Becky, as the two began to raise different species of caged birds.
Parakeets, finches and macaws were just a few of the different varieties of cage birds that Lafleur and his wife raised and sold for roughly 20 years.
“People ask me how many did I have,” Mike said. “I tell them I have sold a minimum 10,000 parakeets in my lifetime. That is a minimum.”
It was during this period of going to exotic animal shows-auctions, like the well-known events in Macon, Missouri and Huntsville, Texas, that Lafleur got hooked on raising zebras.
“As a result of going to get birds at the exotic sales I started getting into zebras,” Mike said. “I couldn’t come home without one. I bought one that year and then I came back the next year and bought a female and I started raising. I haven’t stopped since.”
Lafleur bought his first zebra in 1996 and has owned, raised (including bottled feeding) and sold dozens in the years since then. He currently has five zebras on his 13-acre property in Vidrine, and has two females that will be giving birth in October. He has had people come as far away as California and Oklahoma that have come to buy zebra babies for farms or petting zoos.
Lafleur warns though zebras are still ‘dangerous” and has seen them take a chunk out of people’s arms at sale barns before. His current wife Annie echoes the sentiment of how they are still wild animals.
“They ask how tame are they and can you ride them?” Annie said. “But a Zebra is still a wild animal. You can train them but you can never tame them. You always have to be wary. The gentlest zebra is wild as the wildest crazy horse you ever saw.”
Lafleur’s collection of exotic animals has not been regulated to the striped four-legged variety. Lafleur has also owned at one time or another, long-haired camels (Bactrian), foxes (Fennec and Artic), dingos, bison, llamas, water buffaloes, exotic cattle (Ankole-Watusi) and monkeys (rhesus macaques).
Not to mention typical farm animals like goats, chickens and cows.
“The only restriction I have ever had is the money,” Mike said, who worked for 30-plus years as a welder and another 18 as a school bus driver for Evangeline Parish. “I have gone into debt to buy some of them. I figure the little bit of money I got I just as soon enjoy it.”
Lafleur has been forced to get rid some of his animals over the years. In 2006, the state of Louisiana no longer allowed people to personally own any kind of primate, a wolf or half-breed wolf, large cats (leopards, lions, etc.) and bears.
“When the state did that I was already grand-fathered in for the monkeys but I wasn’t allowed to buy anymore though and I couldn’t breed them either,” Mike said. “So I brought them back to the sale and I came home with a camel.”
Having so many animals on his property, with most of them not being indigenous to the state or the United States for that matter, has made Lafleur’s property a makeshift roadside attraction of sorts.
People routinely pull up daily to the property, sometimes in van and car loads. Lafleur and his new wife Annie always oblige the visitors.
“I would like to know how many mailboxes I have had to replace,” laughed Mike.
Lafleur’s new wife was one of those impressed with his passion for animals.
“When I was still married to my late husband,” Annie said. “I went next door to Keith’s (Fontenot) place to buy a baby goat for my kids as a pet. He pointed out all of Mike’s animals in the pasture. I saw that and said “Boy why couldn’t I had married man like that?”
Annie had no problems embracing her new husband’s passion for exotic animals. Her grandparents were farmers and she had her own horse as a teenager.
But that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t say no sometimes to his requests.
“Sometimes I tell him yes and sometimes I tell him no,” laughed Annie. “If it is something that I don’t like then I tell him ‘you don’t need that.’”
Mike has no desire to slow down.
“When I was younger people would tell me, ‘when I retire I will get that,’” Mike said. “But if you wait until your retire then you are either too broke or too sick.”