8 Animals That Are Illegal to Keep as Pets in Many States

The post 8 Animals That Are Illegal to Keep as Pets in Many States first appeared on Crafting Your Home.

“Dogs are man’s best friend” is one of those American sayings that barely needs explaining. Pets are woven so deeply into American life that 95 million U.S. households owned at least one in 2025, according to the American Pet Products Association.

That devotion is unfolding alongside another distinctly American problem: loneliness. The U.S. Surgeon General has described social isolation and loneliness as major threats to individual and societal well-being.

So it is hardly surprising that Americans have become increasingly comfortable treating animals as companions, family members and fixtures of everyday life. Some of those animals, however, are far beyond the usual dog-or-cat category, and states have drawn very different legal lines around who can keep them.

Big cats

Lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, cheetahs and cougars became subject to a much tougher federal standard after Congress enacted the Big Cat Public Safety Act in December 2022.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says the law generally prohibits private individuals from possessing, breeding, buying, selling or transporting the covered big cats, with specific exceptions for qualifying zoos, sanctuaries, government entities and certain other facilities. People who already owned qualifying big cats when the law took effect had to register them by June 18, 2023, to retain them under the private-owner exception.

The scale of private ownership helps explain why the change mattered. In a 2023 notice, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that about 20,000 big cats were privately owned in the United States.

For Americans considering a tiger cub as an unusual household pet, federal law is now a major barrier, regardless of what their state permits.

Bears

Bears appear repeatedly in state dangerous-wildlife laws, including black bears, grizzly bears and polar bears.

Mississippi, for example, classifies bears among the wild animals considered inherently dangerous and requires a permit to import, sell, transfer, purchase, or possess animals covered by its dangerous-wildlife statute.

New York takes a much broader approach. State law prohibits knowingly possessing wild animals as pets, with narrow exceptions for qualifying circumstances and certain animals already held when the restrictions took effect. A 2025 New York Department of Environmental Conservation document specifically noted that bears cannot simply be retained as personal pets under the state’s current licensing framework.

The legal problem is easy to miss because bears sometimes appear tame in viral videos and private collections. State wildlife statutes generally focus on the species, the circumstances of possession, and permit status rather than how friendly an individual animal appears.

Monkeys and other primates

The idea of a monkey living in an American home has a surprisingly long history, but private primate ownership is heavily restricted nationwide.

The Animal Legal & Historical Center’s current state-law map places California, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont and Washington among states with comprehensive exotic-animal bans. Many of those laws cover nonhuman primates.

A study published in PLOS One found advertisements for pet primates across 22 states during its research period, illustrating how the market can continue operating across a patchwork of regulations. The researchers also found that some primates were advertised in states where private ownership was prohibited.

That gap between what appears for sale and what residents can legally own is one reason exotic-pet legality cannot be determined simply by finding an animal advertised online.

Wolves and wolf-dog hybrids

Wolves occupy an awkward legal category because a wolf, a wolf-dog hybrid and an ordinary domestic dog can look superficially similar while being treated very differently under state law.

Mississippi lists wolves among its inherent