AT THE INSTITUTE OF GREATLY Endangered and Rare Species (TIGERS), outside Myrtle Beach, the ligers share a 50-acre spread with some 80 other nonhybrid cats, bears, primates, wolves, and raptors, as well as a white crocodile and an African elephant. Animal trainer Bhagavan Antle, 47, runs TIGERS with a crew of assistants who live on the grounds, eat vegetarian meals, and learn how to work safely with the menagerie.

I first meet Antle at the fenced-off preserve on a cold, wet January day. Inside a safari-themed lodge used to greet visitors who pay for private tours, he shows me recordings of his numerous media appearances and movie gigs. He's provided animals for such Hollywood films as Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Forrest Gump, and Dr. Dolittle.

Antle, who wears a ponytail and hoop earrings, is something of a hybrid himself. Raised on an Arizona cattle ranch, in the late seventies he became a disciple of Swami Satchidananda, whose claim to fame was saying the opening blessing at Woodstock.

Antle's exotic-animal career just sort of happened after he started working at a health clinic affiliated with the swami's ashram, Yogaville, in Buckingham County, Virginia. In 1982, a visitor to the clinic gave Antle a tiger cub. Later, another visitor—one who worked for "tiger in your tank" Exxon—asked him to lecture on health issues, cub in tow, at a company gathering. By the mid-eighties, Antle had become a full-time exotic-animal guy, breeding and training large, charismatic species for exhibition and rental to the entertainment industry. To his astonishment, a few years later, his male lion Arthur successfully mated with one of his tigresses. A second liger litter arrived in 2002.

A movie that Antle had nothing to do with made ligers famous. In 2004's geek-glorifying Napoleon Dynamite, Napoleon sketches a liger in his school notebook and declares, "It's pretty much my favorite animal ... Bred for its skills in magic." Antle, one of the few liger owners in the world, did the rounds with Anderson Cooper and Matt Lauer. "We had such a big splash of exposure," he says. "We saw the valuable public appeal. It was like opening a chapter of myth that had come to life."

After Antle finishes showing me around, three of his assistants appear on the lodge's deck with Sinbad. The supersize beast has lighter stripes than a tiger and a lion-shaped head with no mane. His arms look stubby and his pectoral muscles are sagging. As we watch through a glass wall, a woman offers a chunk of meat from atop a platform, to make Sinbad stand and show off his 12-foot frame. The assistants guide him around using chains and a baby bottle, and then Antle invites me out for a closer look. He walks up and snuggles Sinbad's muzzle. "Hi, bud," he coos, as if he's playing kissy-face with a kitten.

Sinbad could remove Antle's head with a single chomp, but I'm more enchanted than scared. It's like seeing a Sasquatch or centaur in the flesh. "In our core belief, people don't want to accept the idea that two distinctly different-looking wild animals can reproduce," Antle says. "Ligers make people understand that hybridization is real."