Is it possible to remove all the teeth of a wild animal?

This is a stupid question, but it’s late and I’m bored:

Reading here about another wild-animal-foolishly-kept-as-a-pet-and-something-goes-wrong-and-the-human-buys-it story.

Ignoring the humane aspects of it (so I don’t need to hear from the ASPCA or PETA crowd, thanks) is it possible to remove all of the teeth of a predator animal (like a Tiger) and have the animal survive (both short-term from the resulting surgical pain and long-term from the resulting inability to chew/rip food apart) ?

has this ever been tried before?

Dogs can survive without any teeth, but they’re more scavengers than predators. There’s nothing in particular about toothlessness that would inevitably cause the death of an animal, as long as it could still obtain adequate nutrition - so your tiger could be fed with some kind of processed food, however…

Tigers are prone to depression in captivity (and I can only imagine that removal of all the teeth would make this worse), so feeding might have to be forced, and general behaviour might be hostile - I’m thinking that removing the teeth and leaving the claws will still result in the death of the keeper - and tigers are big - even a declawed, toothless tiger could beat the living shit out of an adult human, if it chose to.

My impression is that big cats kill by breaking the neck with a blow or by clamping their jaws around the throat and crushing/asphyxiating. Both methods would kill you even without claws or teeth.

It’s worth noting the tiger in the article weighs 650 pounds. The quaint reporting describes him losing control of the tiger once previously when it mauled a ten-year-old boy by saying 66-year-old Buswald had the tiger on a leash, but “lost his balance” when it lunged.

It’s not so much “losing one’s balance,” is it, when 650 pounds of supremely-muscled carnivore lunges, as it is “being dragged along like a leaf.”

I think “omnivores” more correctly describes dogs, although they are certainly not above scavenging.

Also, curiously, the article describes a debate about whether the tiger is legally at fault. Can a wild animal be legally at fault?

True. What I really meant though is that I don’t think a dog would consider a toothless life filled with meaty soup to be a hardship, whereas a Tiger might not take to it with stoicism.

The differentiation between “predator” and “scavenger” is not a clear line. Much of that kind of thinking disappeared when technology permitted detailed observation of animal behavior at night and so on.