No, no, no! Didn’t you hear? Siegfried Says Tiger Was Trying to Help
Getting WAY WAY off topic, I have a friend who drives from Racine to 124th and capitol everyday. When she first started I had to explain how the freeway makes a giant circle and she had to pay attention to the radio and overhead signs to decide if it’s faster to take 894, 94 or the roads that day. Back when my father owned two stores, his daile commute was: Whitefish Bay, St Francis, Mequon, St Francis, Mequon, St Francis, Whitefish Bay. He flipped is odometer TWICE in two or three years.
I take that back, she’s not driving from Racine, it’s Kenosha even further.
Isn’t that where the street car around the corner bends?
Yes, but without the video, how will we know whether to charge that homophobic tiger with a bias crime?
Here is an interesting account from Steve Wynn, explaining why he does not think this was an attack. It stands to reason, considering the cat’s actions after the “attack”. Probably the best insider account I have read thus far.
Given that I really know nothing about the behaviour of these animals, I’m willing to give him the benefit of a doubt.
Well . . . the tiger tried to drag Roy back into his cage in his continuing efforts to “help” him, which in my mind is not overtly inconsistent with continuing efforts to “eat” him.
There seems to be a little too much insistence on the pacifistic nature of the tiger – especially from those who are most open to criticism on the grounds that having insanely powerful wild beasts used in a rhinestone-studded sideshow is not the safest, or most humane, or smartest thing to be doing. Even by Wynn’s account (and it’s not clear why he should be deemed especially reliable, as he was admittedly not a percipient witness (and if he had been, would have been about the worst imaginable, as he’s going blind, right?)), the tiger was a very short distance away from, and “fascinated” by, some woman in the front row of the audience. Mr. Wynn may be backpedalling at top speed to distract from any suggestion that he came very close to owing the family of Mrs. Tourist many millions of dollars for allowing such an asinine show to be put on (to say nothing of the crimes against humanity that are perpetrated each time the boys don their spangled, codpieced costumes before even coming out on stage).
Roy apparently thought something was pretty close to getting out of hand, or was already, as he was (reading past some of the antiseptic portrayals of his calmly “tapping” or playfully “whacking” the tiger), with some urgency it seems, yanking the tiger’s chain and (in the unfortunate turn of phrase of one news account, given Roy’s alleged proclivities) “beating it off with his microphone.”
ohhhh Wesley, this is so bad… although couldn’t help but smile …!
This morning I heard they had it all on a security camera. It supposely shows clearly the tiger was “helping” Roy after he fell. So they said. It will for sure be on the air, or internet, pretty soon I am guessing.
I dunno 'bout that helpful tiger idea…
From the link:
Lucky? LUCKY?
I call shenanigans. A 600-pound tiger against a prone human? Luck doesn’t enter into it. A tiger can kill a person accidentally. If Montecore truly wanted to hurt him, Ol’ Roy would be so much tigershit by now.
Both cats and dogs protect, defend and correct the behaviour of their young by grasping it by the back of the neck.
True, tigers aren’t like our little moggies. But they often kill their prey by going for the front of the throat. That’s not to say that they don’t commonly go for the back of the neck, to sever the spinal cord. here.
But that gets us back to the question of the strength and intent of the animal.
A single tiger can pull down a fully-grown buffalo. With strength like that at its disposal, is there any way that a wounded human could escape being killed if that’s what the tiger intends? I really doubt it.
Furthermore, from the Steve Wynn interview,
(bolding mine)
If Roy were on his back, any predatory act would not have involved turning him over to a “safe” carrying position.
Apparently over 2000 of us morbid bastards, according to the hit count on this thread.
I keep hearing "if the tiger had really wanted to kill Roy…blah blah, but probably the tiger didn’t really think about its actions at all.
Two things about this,
- You are forgetting that this tiger was hand raised by Roy since it was born. It didn’t have the benefit of observing its mother kill prey, and never had the practice of attacking a live animal. Even for tigers, practice is very important.
You can’t say on the one hand: “well its instinct would have given it the power to kill its prey the proper way without any kind of practice or example” yet on the other, claim that a tiger’s instinctively aggressive and mercurial nature is somehow absent in this particular animal.
I think the tiger was just a very inept tiger, and kind of missed with one half-hearted swoop. There’s a wide range of behavior between a vicious attack, and playful biting. He probably wasn’t hungry, but was annoyed, and wanted Roy to stop.
- I think the whole bit about the tiger protecting Roy is a crock of you-know-what. I’d believe that sooner with a lion. Unlike lions, tigers are not social animals. A male tiger never knows its own cubs, and only comes together with another tiger when it is mating. Montecore was a male tiger. How do you propose this male tiger was treating Roy as a “cub” if its whole training revolved around viewing Roy as its mother, or master?