In September 1987, Michael Jackson walked into Osaka City Hall. He was not alone. Seated beside him, calm and completely composed, was a chimpanzee named Bubbles. The mayor of Osaka, Yasushi Oshima, later told reporters he and his fellow officials were surprised to see the chimpanzee, but they understood, he said, that this animal was Michael’s good friend.
Oshima then added something that no one has forgotten since. He said it was the first time an animal had ever entered city hall. That moment was not arranged by a publicist. It was not a staged photo opportunity. It was simply how Michael Jackson moved through the world with his animals beside him treated not as props or possessions but as companions who had earned their place in his life.
Most people know one version of this story. They remember Bubbles, the small chimpanzeee in matching outfits, photographed at airports and press events during the height of Michael’s fame. What most people do not know is that Bubbles was just the beginning. Behind the gates of Neverland Ranch, Michael Jackson had quietly built one of the most extraordinary private animal collections in the world.
Not for publicity, not for shock value, for reasons that once you understand them reveal something deeply personal about who he was. The full inventory of what lived at Neverland has been confirmed through multiple accounts. Six giraffes, three elephants, four tigers, eight alligators, seven apes and monkeys, an 18 ft albino python, a boa constrictor who sat in recording studios while he wrote some of the most important songs of his life.
over 20 exotic birds, Chilean flamingos, a bear named Belaloo, who rode golf carts with the animal trainer, and ate ice cream cones outside the Neverland Theater. One former trainer described Belaloo as a full-grown bear that simply acted like a dog, 7 feet tall and 650 lb, completely at ease beside a human being. That was the world inside those gates.
One of the elephants, a 5,000 lb Asian elephant named Gypsy, was a gift. Elizabeth Taylor had married her last husband at Neverland in 1991. Michael paid the entire $1.5 million for the wedding without being asked. As a thank you, Taylor surprised him with an elephant shipped from Asia. Michael received a titanium elephant purse in return.
That exchange between two people who understood each other completely says everything about the friendship and nothing about how the media covered it. Michael himself was never shy about explaining why animals mattered to him. In one interview, he said plainly, “I can relate to them a lot better than I can to humans.
” In another recorded for a music newspaper in 1980, years before Neverland even existed, he said he had a wonderful relationship with animals because they really understood him. He said he wanted to study veterinary science. He wanted to understand animal behavior at a deeper level. This was not a celebrity making a casual remark.
This was a young man in his early 20s who had already begun building a life around creatures that responded to him in a way most humans never did. Actress Tippy Hedrin, founder of the Shambala Preserve in California and one of the most respected names in exotic animal care in the United States, shared her tigers enclosure veterinarian with Michael for 3 years.
When his tigers, Thriller and Sabu, were relocated to her sanctuary after Neverland’s closure, she was asked directly about the condition they arrived in. She said everything had been perfect. The best food, the best human care, wonderful areas to live. She said it was spectacular. She said he loved those animals.
What this video covers is the real documented story of that love. Not the tabloid version, not the eccentric celebrity narrative, but the specific verifiable moments that reveal what Michael Jackson’s bond with animals actually looked like. A chimpanzee who drank green tea with the Japanese mayor. A bear who rode bumper cars.
An elephant who was a wedding gift. Tigers who arrived at a California sanctuary in perfect health. A python named Madonna. a boa constrictor named Muscles who sat beside him in the studio while he wrote some of the most important songs of his life. Michael once said he loved animals because all they really want from you is love and that is sometimes too much to ask from some people.
This is the story of the animals who never asked for anything else. In 1983, a chimpanzee was born in a biomed research laboratory in Austin, Texas. The facility bred primates for animal testing. He was taken from his mother as an infant and handed to a Hollywood animal trainer who supplied animals for films, photooots, and commercials.
That trainer presented the 8-month-old chimpanzeee to Michael Jackson. His name was Bubbles. What happened next is one of the most documented and genuinely unusual stories in the history of celebrity and animals. Michael did not treat Bubbles as a novelty or a pet in the conventional sense. He treated him as a member of his household.
Bubbles lived at the Jackson family home in Inino, California first, eating at the dining table, sleeping in a crib inside Michael’s bedroom, wearing clothes made to match Michael’s own outfits. When Michael moved to Neverland Ranch in 1988, Bubbles came with him. At Neverland, he used Michael’s toilet, ate candy in the private movie theater, and moved through the estate with complete freedom.
Michael taught Bubbles to moonwalk. Multiple accounts confirmed this. He would demonstrate the move, and Bubbles would watch and imitate it. An animal born in a research laboratory in Texas with no exposure to music or performance, learning to replicate the most iconic dance step in pop history simply by watching the man who invented it every single day.
Michael also brought Bubbles into the recording studio. During the sessions for the Bad album in 1987, Jackson insisted that Bubbles attend as a spectator alongside his pet boa constrictor. The two animals sat in while some of the most commercially successful music of that era was being recorded.
Bubbles later appeared on camera in the music videos for Liberian Girl and Leave Me Alone, a chimpanzee with an actual screen presence, appearing alongside some of the biggest names in entertainment. Then came Japan. When the Bad World Tour opened in September 1987, Bubbles flew to Tokyo with Michael. They shared a two-bedroom suite.
On September 18th, 1987, Michael and Bubbles visited Osaka City Hall where they were received by Mayor Yasushi Oshima. Bubbles sat quietly at the table and drank Japanese green tea. Oshima told reporters afterward that he and his officials had been surprised to see the chimpanzee, but that they understood he was Michael’s good friend.
He then added that it was the first time an animal had ever entered city hall. Photographs from that day exist and have been widely published. They show bubbles composed and calm seated beside one of the most famous human beings on the planet at an official government meeting in a foreign country. That same tour season, Bubbles attended a promotional party for the Bad Album and was described by multiple witnesses as working the room.
John Bonjovi in a later interview recalled that Bubbles partied like a rock star. But adult chimpanzees are not the same as infant ones. By the early 2000s, Bubbles had grown into a powerful adult male. He weighed over 160 lb. His behavior had become unpredictable, and by 2003, Michael had made the painful decision to remove him from Neverland.
He was initially relocated to a California animal trainer. When that trainer closed his operation in 2004, Bubbles was transferred to the Center for Great Apes in Wula, Florida in 2005, where he has lived ever since. The sanctuary’s founder, Patty Reagan, confirmed in multiple interviews that Michael was making active plans to visit Bubbles at the time of his death in June 2009.
That visit never happened, but the Michael Jackson estate has continued to provide financial support for Bubbles’s care every year since. Today, Bubbles is 43 years old. Male chimpanzees in captivity have an average life expectancy of 33 years. He has already outlived that by a decade. He now weighs 185 lbs and is described by sanctuary staff as the calm and respected leader of his chimpanzeee group, which includes four companions named Oopsie, Bulma, Koda, and Striker. He dislikes cameras.
When staff point one at him, he turns his back or moves away. He spends his days napping in the Florida sun, building nests under trees and painting. He only hands over the canvas when he decides he is finished. Some of his paintings have been auctioned for fundraising, and a few years ago, five of them sold for a combined total of £2,000.
A chimpanzee born in a research laboratory in Texas who once drank green tea with a Japanese mayor is now an elder statesman of a Florida sanctuary painting canvases in the sun cared for by the estate of the man who changed his life entirely. In 1982, Michael Jackson was flying home from London on the Concord.
He had been in England working on Paul McCartney’s album. Somewhere over the Atlantic, a song came to him fully formed. He had no recording equipment, no notepad, nothing. He sat with it in his head for the entire 3-hour flight, memorizing every detail. And the moment he landed, he went straight home and recorded a demo. The song was called Muscles.
He wrote it for Diana Ross. Most people assumed the title referred to a muscular man. It didn’t. Muscles was the name of Michael Jackson’s pet boa constrictor, an 8-foot snake he kept at his home in Enino, California. and draped around his neck so regularly that it made its way into his autobiography. Michael named the song after his snake, gave it to Diana Ross, and watched it climb to number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, spending 17 weeks on the chart.
It earned Ross a Grammy nomination for best female R&B vocal performance. Michael sang uncredited background vocals on the track. The biggest hit he ever wrote for another artist was named after a reptile. The story of how Diana Ross actually encountered Muscles is documented. She came to visit Michael at his home while he was away.
Muscles was there. When Michael returned, Ross was found helping him with one of the more unusual household tasks in music industry history, peeling off the snake’s shedding skin. She had arrived afraid of the animal. She left having touched it, handled it, and assisted in its care. Muscles was not Michael’s only snake.
At Neverland Ranch, he also kept an 18 foot albino Burmese python named Madonna. The two snakes were, according to multiple accounts, both welcome in the recording studio. The image of Michael Jackson’s production sessions at West Lake and Neverland, already among the most intense and perfectionist recording environments in pop music history, apparently also included a boa constrictor and an albino python as regular attendees.
This was documented most directly during the recording sessions for the Bad album in 1987 when Michael insisted that both Bubbles and his pet snake attend the sessions as spectators. Quincy Jones produced the record. The musicians, engineers, and producers who moved in and out of those sessions were working on one of the most commercially anticipated albums of the decade.
And somewhere in the room, coiled or draped, was a snake. Multiple people who worked on that record confirmed this. Nobody apparently was in a position to argue with Michael Jackson about what he brought into his own studio. A Sony Pictures executive recalled visiting Michael at his home in Enino in 1991 during the period when Michael had just signed a record setting $65 million contract with Sony.
Michael led him upstairs to the hallway outside his bedroom, opened a door, gestured inside, and said simply, “This is Muscles.” The executive looked in and saw a massive snake coiled around a tree branch. A white mouse was hiding behind a pile of wood shavings in the corner. That was the introduction.
Michael also took muscles to other people’s homes. Mottown legend Suzanne Depass, the woman who had helped convince Barry Gordy to sign the Jackson 5 years earlier, recalled the night Michael arrived at her house with the boa constrictor wrapped around his neck. She told him directly that the snake was not coming inside.
Michael tried to argue it was fine. She told him it was not fine. They eventually reached an agreement. Muscles would wait on the couch, stuffed inside one of Depass’s expensive designer pillowcases with the top tied off. Michael went to her den to watch videos of his old performances. To pass sat and watched the pillowcase.
When Michael was leaving, he asked if she wanted the pillowcase back. She told him to take the pillowcase, the fitting sheet, and the top sheet. He could have all of it. What happened to the snakes after Neverland was dismantled in the mid200s tells two different stories. Madonna the albino python was relocated and eventually found a permanent home at a nature center in Grand Junction, Colorado, where she was renamed Sunshine.
She weighed over 80 lb at the time of the reports. The whereabouts of Muscles the boa constrictor have never been publicly confirmed. He simply disappeared from the record. Michael Jackson named a number one hit after his snake, draped that snake around his neck in photooots, brought it into recording studios, and carried it to the homes of Mottown legends.
Muscles was not a pet in any conventional sense, he was part of the furniture of Michael’s life, as present and unremarkable to Michael as a guitar or a microphone. In 1983, Michael Jackson was the most famous entertainer on the planet. Thriller had just been released. The record would go on to sell over 70 million copies worldwide and become the bestselling album in history.
Radio stations could not stop playing it. Every television that carried music programming was showing his face. At the precise moment when the entire world wanted a piece of Michael Jackson, he went and bought a llama. The llama’s name was Louie. Michael got him in 1983, the same year Thriller was rewriting the rules of the music industry.
Louie lived at the Jackson family compound on Havenhurst Avenue in Enino, California, a 2acre property in the San Fernando Valley, where Michael had grown up, perfected the Moonwalk, and recorded demos for three of his most important albums. The estate had a movie theater, a koi pond, a candy store, a puppet shop, and an ice cream shop built into it. And now in the yard, a llama.
Photographs from that period document exactly what this looked like. Michael walking Louie along Havenhurst Avenue in broad daylight. The king of pop in casual clothes, strolling through a residential neighborhood in Enino with a South American camelid on a lead. Neighbors and drivers passing the street would stop. Traffic would back up.
People would stare. Michael, by all accounts, found this entirely unremarkable. He talked to Louie the way most people talk to dogs. He adored the llama’s expressive eyes. He joked more than once that Louie always held his chin at a certain angle because the llama was convinced he was about to be discovered as a movie star.
Then Michael started bringing Louie to the recording studio. In 1983, while Michael was riding the commercial peak of his career, he began working on a studio collaboration with Freddy Mercury of Queen. The two men had genuine mutual respect and admiration. Mercury had first met Michael when Michael began showing up to Queen concerts at the Forum in Los Angeles, eventually introducing himself backstage.
They started recording together at Michael’s home studio in Enino, working on three songs. There must be more to life than this. state of shock and victory. Michael brought Louisie to the sessions not once, every day. Queen’s manager, Jim Beach, known as Miami Beach, received a frantic phone call from Mercury.
As Beachch later recalled in the 2012 documentary Freddy Mercury, the Great Pretender, Mercury called him and said, “Miami, dear, can you get over here? You’ve got to get me out of here. I’m recording with a llama.” Mercury had sat through the first sessions. He had tolerated the presence of livestock in a professional recording environment for some days. Then he reached his limit.
Mercury’s basist, Joe Bert, confirmed the story separately to the New York Post, saying simply, “I think the last straw was when Michael brought his pet llama into the studio. Freddy sort of took umbrage to that.” The three songs they recorded together were never officially released as duets during either man’s lifetime.
Mercury died in 1991. Michael died in 2009. What could have been one of the most significant musical collaborations of the 20th century ended in part because of a llama named Louie standing in a recording studio in Enino. Louie was not the only llama Michael owned. There was also Lola, described as a young llama Michael adored completely.
The two llamas lived together at the Havenhurst property, where Lousie was the one Michael walked through the neighborhood and brought to recording sessions. Lola appears to have been more privately kept. Michael mentioned Lola only once on record in a video filmed at the Enino compound in which he briefly acknowledges her while introducing Lousie to the camera.
The grief around Lola was private. She was killed by dogs on the property. Michael made no public statement, no press release, no interview, no public acknowledgement. He simply carried it. a quietly devastating loss inside a life that was conducted almost entirely in public. What happened to Louie after Michael moved to Neverland Ranch in 1988 is not part of the documented record.
After Neverland’s closure in the mid200s, the whereabouts of both llamas disappeared entirely from any public accounting. Michael had also written a song about Lola titled simply Llama Lola, which he acknowledged in a 1993 deposition. It has never been released. He wrote songs for his animals. He walked them through traffic stopping in Cenino streets.
He brought them into recording studios with Freddy Mercury. And when one of them died, he said nothing about it at all. Thriller and Sabu were born on November 20th, 1998. They were Bengal tigers, litter mates, a female and her brother, and they spent the first 7 and 1/2 years of their lives at Neverland Ranch.
When Michael Jackson left Neverland for good in 2006, his veterinarian made a phone call to Tippy Hedrin. Hedrin was already one of the most recognized names in exotic animal welfare in the United States. Alfred Hitchcock had made her famous in the 1960s through the birds and Marne. But her real life’s work was the Shambala Preserve, an 80 acre wildlife habitat she had founded in Actton, California, about 50 miles north of Los Angeles, dedicated to the care and preservation of lions and tigers.
She had spent decades building it. When Michael’s veterinarian called and asked if she could take the two Bengal tigers, Hedin agreed. She then spent $79,000 of her own money building a new habitat for them next to the preserve’s lake with trees, a hill, and enough space for two large cats to live properly. Thriller and Sabu arrived at Shambala in excellent physical and emotional health.
Hedin confirmed this explicitly. She said the animals were beautifully treated at Neverland, the best food, the best care. They arrived without trauma. Whatever had happened behind those gates, the tigers had not suffered for it. What happened next at Shambala revealed something interesting about the two animals.
In the wild, female tigers are typically submissive to males. Thriller reversed that entirely. She stole food from Sabu, behavior described as unheard of between tigers. She ruled their shared habitat. She was independent, feisty, and completely dominant over her much larger brother. Hedin compared her to Greta Garbo, selective about who she allowed near her, entirely on her own terms.
Sabu, by contrast, was calmer, more open, easier to approach. In 2011, Michael’s iconic red and black jacket from the thriller music video was sold at auction for $1.8 million. Part of the proceeds were directed to Shambala to help fund the tiger’s care. It was the only financial support the preserve ever received in connection with the animals.
Hedin noted that in all the years Thriller and Sabu lived at the preserve, Michael never personally called to check on them. The preserve sent a package of photographs and memorabilia to his children a year after the tigers arrived. They never heard back. Hedrin said she found it odd.
She also said she and her team were proud of what they gave those animals regardless. Thriller died on June 11th, 2012 of lung cancer. She was 13 years old and weighed 375 lbs. A necropsy was performed and she was cremated. The preserve staff held a private service when her ashes were buried in a section of the grounds set aside for animals that die there.
Sabu remained at Shambala alone in the habitat they had shared. Tigers are solitary in the wild, so he stayed in his space. He remained in good health. The tigers were the most visible of Michael’s reptile and predator collection, but they were not the most unusual chapter in that story. Neverland also housed eight alligators and at least one crocodile.
When the ranch was dismantled after Michael’s death, those animals were relocated to a zoo in Weinewood, Oklahoma, the Gerald Wayne Interactive Zoological Park, run by a man who would later become famous in an entirely different context. In March 2015, a fire broke out at the zoo in the early hours of the morning. It tore through the video production studio on the property and into the enclosures housing the reptiles.
Seven alligators and one crocodile died in the blaze. The fire was later determined to be arson. The zoo’s owner recorded a video statement afterward saying the animals had been boiling alive in a towering inferno. Then he added directly into the camera, “The building can be replaced, the equipment can be replaced, but Michael Jackson’s alligators cannot be replaced.
” The alligators from Neverland had survived the closure of the ranch. the relocation to Oklahoma, years in a new facility, and then died in a fire that was deliberately set. New York magazine later confirmed that some of the animals killed were not the original Neverland alligators, but their offspring, baby alligators born at the zoo from parents who had once lived at Michael Jackson’s ranch.
Two Bengal tigers born in 1998. Eight alligators and a crocodile relocated across the country. One died of lung cancer in California sanctuary. The others died in an arson fire in Oklahoma. The animals Michael Jackson kept did not simply disappear when he left. Their stories continued. And some of those stories ended in ways nobody anticipated.
In October 1991, Elizabeth Taylor married Larry Forensky at Neverland Ranch. It was her eighth marriage. Michael Jackson paid the entire $1.5 million bill for the wedding without being asked. He arranged the ceremony, the catering, the security, the flowers. He opened his home to hundreds of guests and oversaw every detail.
When it was over and the guests had gone home, Taylor wanted to say thank you. She could have sent jewelry. She could have sent flowers. She sent an elephant. The elephant’s name was Gypsy. She was a 5,000 lb Asian elephant. and she was delivered to Neverland Ranch as a surprise. Tim Mendelson, Elizabeth Taylor’s longtime personal assistant, confirmed the story directly in a 2024 interview.
He said Taylor gave people cars on occasion, but presenting a live elephant to the King of Pop at his ranch in California was entirely consistent with how she thought about gratitude. Michael received Gypsy. In return, he gave Taylor a titanium elephant purse. It was that kind of friendship. Gypsy was not the only elephant at Neverland.
There were at least three, the most documented of the others were Ali and Baba, two African elephants whose origin story is the most complicated of all the animals Michael ever owned. Ali was born in the wild in 1990 or 1991 in South Africa’s Krueger National Park, one of the largest game reserves on the African continent.
Baba was born around the same time in the same park. Both were called from their herds as young calves in a routine herd management practice that was standard at the time, then sold into the international exotic animal trade. They eventually passed through the hands of Ricardo Guasa, an animal trafficker in South Africa who was later convicted of drug offenses and documented animal cruelty.
The executive director of the National Council of SPCAs in South Africa confirmed that while the elephants were in Guasa’s possession, they were beaten with a bullhook, a sharpened metal baton used to control elephants, deprived of water and food, and forced into submission to prepare them for international transport. The two young calves had already watched their herds be cold.
Then they were subjected to months of that. Guasa sold Ali and Baba to Michael Jackson. What happened when they arrived in Neverland is where the record becomes divided. The former Neverland animal trainer, Mark Bianelli, who worked on the ranch and remained one of its most credible eyewitnesses, spoke positively about the care the animals received in his time there.
A separate piece of footage later surfaced showing a trainer using a bull hook on one of the elephants at Neverland, which a 2022 documentary placed on the record. The handler shown in the footage, when confronted with it years later, acknowledged it and expressed regret, making the point that practices around elephant care in captivity in the 1990s were less understood than they are today.
Bullhooks have since been banned in California. Michael had originally purchased Ali and Baba with plans to breed elephants at Neverland. When construction on the required facilities was delayed in 1997, he donated Ali to the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens in Florida. Ali arrived at the Jacksonville Zoo on February 20th, 1997.
He is still there today. Ali is now in his mid30s. He weighs 11,000 lb and lives alongside two female African elephants named Thie and Sheena. In April 2024, a team of 30 large mammal experts, including veterinary dentists, anesthesiologists, and specialists flown in from the United States, South Africa, and India, gathered at the Jacksonville Zoo to perform a 3 and 1/2-hour tusk surgery on Ali to treat an infected tusk and prevent the infection from spreading.
The procedure required full anesthesia and was the equivalent of a root canal. It went successfully. He recovered. In 2018, he had briefly escaped his enclosure when a gate was accidentally left open, wandered into a courtyard for 20 minutes, and was lured back inside with food. He made international headlines both times.
An elephant born in the Krueger National Park, sold into the exotic animal trade, transported to a pop stars ranch in California, then donated to a Florida zoo where he has now lived for nearly 30 years. Baba, the female elephant who arrived at Neverland alongside Ali, took a different path. She was relocated in 2006 when Neverland closed and has been living at Serengeti Ranch in Actton, California, the same town where Tippihedrin’s Shambblea Preserve is located, working as a trained animal for the film industry.
Three elephants, three entirely different outcomes. One delivered as a surprise thank you gift by the most famous actress in Hollywood history. Two purchased as traumatized calves from a South African wildlife trafficker. One is now a zoo elephant in Florida recovering from tusk surgery. One is working on film sets in California.
And one Gypsy passed through Neverland quietly, her final whereabouts never confirmed in any public record. When Michael Jackson left Neverland Ranch in 2005 following his acquitt at trial, he made a statement through his representatives that he would never return. He kept that promise. The gates closed.
The amusement park ride stopped running. The train that circled the estate fell silent. And somewhere inside those 2700 acres, dozens of animals were still living, eating, sleeping, waiting, with no idea that the world they had known for years was about to be dismantled around them. What happened next was one of the largest private animal relocations in American history.
over 50 species arrangements handled primarily by Martin Dennis, the Neverland veterinarian, who had overseen the animals care during the ranch’s operational years. Michael reportedly gave his approval for the final destinations of all his animals before the dispersal began. What actually happened to them tells a story that is more complicated and in some cases more painful than the version most people know.
The 13 Chilean flamingos were among the most straightforward cases. In 2007, they were transferred to the Cape May County Zoo in New Jersey, a free admission facility that had been operating since 1978 and was ranked by Trip Adviser in 2015 as one of the top five zoos in the United States. The flamingos arrived and were integrated into the zoo’s existing flock.
They now spend their summers outside in the flamingo yard and their winters inside the world of birds aviary. Chilean flamingos are the smallest of all flamingo species. They are filter feeders, drawing water into their hooked beaks and expelling it through comblike structures called lamelea to trap the shrimp and invertebrates they eat.
13 of them, pink and ungainainely and alive, have been walking the grounds of a New Jersey zoo for nearly 20 years. If you visit Cape May today, you can see them. The four giraffes had a harder journey. Their names were Rambo, Princess, Jabar Jr., and Annie Sue. In 2007, they were relocated to the Banjo Wildlife Preserve in Paige, Arizona, a facility run by a retired couple named Tom and Freddy Hancock, who had named their operation Voices of the Wild Foundation.
The Hancocks had genuine affection for the animals. What they lacked was the infrastructure, resources, and expertise that four giraffes require to survive in the Arizona climate. In late 2009, the same year Michael Jackson died, two of the giraffes died within weeks of each other. PETA sent a formal letter to Paige, Arizona’s police chief demanding the immediate confiscation of the two surviving animals, citing possible improper feeding and exposure to cold temperatures as the cause of death.
The Hancocks denied negligence and said the animals had been inspected by the USDA. The investigation PETA requested never formally occurred. The two surviving giraffes were eventually moved to a sanctuary in Utah. Their current status has not been publicly confirmed. Michael’s Amazon parrot, Ricky, one of his personal favorites, who had lived inside the main house rather than in the estate’s aviary, went to the Banjo Preserve alongside the giraffes.
In 2013, Ricky and several other birds from the preserve were transferred to a bed and breakfast in Colorado called Montrose Manor. Ricky was 45 years old at the time of that transfer. Amazon parrots can live to 70 or 80 years in captivity. Whether Ricky is still alive today has not been confirmed in any public record.
The two orangutans from Neverland went to a private owner in Connecticut. Two other chimpanzees who had lived at the ranch, Max and AJ, were less wellknown than Bubbles, but equally real. Max had become notorious among Neverland staff for using the walls of the mansion as a toilet. AJ had been quieter and less photographed.
After the dispersal, one of them was reported to have gone to a zoo in South Korea. The other went to a breeding facility in Kansas. Their individual fates beyond those placements are not documented. The four remaining giraffes, the parrot, the orangutans, the chimpanzees, the flamingos, the snakes, the alligators, the elephants, the tigers, 50 species, hundreds of individual animals scattered across the country to facilities ranging from worldclass sanctuaries to a couple running an underfunded preserve in the Arizona desert. Michael Jackson’s
veterinarian had tried to place every animal responsibly. Some of those placements worked. The flamingos in New Jersey are still alive. Bubbles in Florida is still alive. Ali the elephant in Jacksonville is still alive. Sabu the tiger status at Shambala is unconfirmed, but the preserve remains active. Some placements did not work.
Two giraffes named Princess and Annie Sue died in Arizona in 2015. Seven alligators died in an arson fire in Oklahoma in 2015. The gates of Neverland closed once. What was behind them spread across the entire country. >> Michael Jackson once said, “I love animals because all they really want from you is love.
” Too bad that’s even too much to ask for from some people. He said it simply without elaboration, but if you have watched this video from the beginning, you already understand exactly what he meant. He grew up in a house in Gary, Indiana, where he shared a bedroom with his brothers and rehearsed in the living room until midnight.
He was performing in adult nightclubs at the age of seven. By the time he was 11, he had a record deal. By the time he was 12, he had a number one hit. There was no childhood. There were no afternoons off. There were no summers. just schedules, studios, sequins, and a father standing in every corner of every room. In almost every account of his early life, one detail appears consistently.
Even as a young boy, Michael gravitated toward animals. He kept rots as pets when other kids kept baseball cards. He named his white rat Ben after a song he recorded for a horror film about killer rats. And that song became one of his first solo hits. The Rat came before the song. The Attachment came first. By the time he was 24, he was the most famous entertainer on the planet, and he was spending his evenings in recording studios with a boa constrictor named Muscles draped across his shoulders.
By the time he was 29, he was walking into Japanese government buildings with a chimpanzee seated beside him. By 30, he owned a ranch in the Santa Barbara Hills that he filled with every animal he had ever wanted and opened free of charge to thousands of children who had never seen a giraffe or touched an elephant or stood close enough to a flamingo to hear one move.
He said that himself in a 2002 interview. He told a reporter, “Everything that I love is behind those gates. We have elephants and giraffes and crocodiles and every kind of tigers and lions. And we have busloadads of kids who don’t get to see those things. That was why he built it. Not for the photographs, not for the press coverage, for the busloadads of children who arrived at a gate in the Santa Barbara Hills and walked into a world that most adults never see even once.
His vocal director for the This Is It concerts, Dorian Holly, said something after Michael’s death that has stayed in the public record. He said Michael would remind the people around him constantly, that the shows were not about him, that they were there to spread a message of love and care for the planet, that the world was dear and not to be taken for granted.
Holly said it almost sounded crazy to say that the show was not about him, but that was what he said again and again in rehearsals, in conversations, backstage. Director Brett Rottner, who photographed Michael extensively and traveled with him to South Africa, put it more directly. He said, “How could you be mean or cruel to an animal? He loved animals so much.
” In Sun City, Ratner watched Michael lean over a fence to get closer to a one-legged crocodile named Foot Loose. The animal handlers were nervous. Michael was not nervous. He wanted to see it. He wanted to touch it. He brought his umbrella and leaned over the fence until he was close enough to be satisfied. Tippy Hedrin, when Michael died in June 2009, released a statement.
She said, “Michael Jackson was not only loved by the people of the world for his incomparable talent. He was loved by the magnificent wild animals for which he provided the most beautiful home at his Neverland ranch.” That statement came from a woman who also said on the record that he never called to check on the tigers after they left.
Both things are true. The world is rarely simple enough for only one of them to be. What this video has documented is the verified record. A chimpanzee born in a Texas research laboratory who is now 43 years old and painting canvases in Florida. An elephant born in Krueger National Park who underwent tusk surgery in Jacksonville in 2024.
13 flamingos walking a New Jersey zoo. A tiger named after his most famous album buried in a California hillside in 2012. They were all here. They all moved through his life. Some of them are still alive. If you found this story worth your time, leave a comment below telling us which of these animals surprised you most.
And if you want the stories that never make the documentaries, subscribe. There are more of them.
