Note that the tiger attacked the boy in the back of the neck, which is where cats attack to kill prey. No magic show accident was this. The tiger was hungry, and Little Boy was on the menu.
Now, I have to stress here that I am not a zoologist. I am not a veterinarian. I am not an animal behaviourologist. I am not a ranking expert on large Asiatic carnivores. And as I am sure you will all agree, I am no genius, able to speak with effortless expertise on any matter of things. But I feel it safe to say that TIGERS DON’T MAKE GOOD PETS!!!
Surely the most surreal sentence in the news recently has to be:
A leash. How cute! Siberian tigers are the largest living felines; an adult tom weighs about 400-500 pounds or more, has the strength of a dozen men, can shred you like cole slaw, and isn’t afraid of humans. I’ve seen them. They’re the size of Harley choppers and twice as fast, and they’re not too shy about considering humans to be delicacies; I saw one charge a little kid that had wandered away from her parents (thank Christ for the fence) and let me tell you, that son of a bitch covered sixty yards in the blink of an eye and didn’t make a sound. He weighed, oh, 500 pounds, easy. You’re going to hold that fucker back with a LEASH? “Come back here, Fluffy! Put that leg down!”
What kind of small-dicked fuckstacker owns a Siberian tiger as a goddamned pet? Oh, I just answered my own question, didn’t I? Anyone who feels the need to keep a fucking tiger as a pet has to be compensating for something, doesn’t he? Fuckwit!
Actually if Fluffy would have meant killing he would have attacked the childs throat, the fact that the children survived (in spite of your accurate description of the speed and might of the animal) probably means that the tiger was just playing. Not that it makes things any better, mind you; anyone who keeps a pet that plays like that, AND, lets it out of the cage among strangers is a mayor league idiot to say the least.
When I was in college, my local mall made the national news. A photographer set up in the middle of the mall with his business, “Goldilocks and Her Bear.” For a modest sum, your small child could have its picture taken with Goldilocks and a real, live bear.
Tigers bite the throat of their prey if the prey is large enough to present a serious challenge. When they bite the throat, they keep their teeth sunk in for minutes to ensure that dinner is safely dead and no longer presents a threat. Tigers prefer to kill smaller prey by severing the spinal cord at the back of the neck. So this tiger probably did mean to kill the boy.
However, housecats get strange maternal instincts towards humans, and the behavior of housecats and tigers is so bizarrely similiar. Perhaps, the tiger was experiencing some warped mothering instinct and wanted to drag this funny-looking naked kitten into the lair for safekeeping.
Man, I think of this stuff every time my twelve-pounder gets carried away as he wrestles my foot. Jeoffry the cat I can shake off. A pet tiger? Not so easily. What size water-filled squirt bottle is needed to get a tiger off the kitchen table anyway?
My ex was friends with a guy who kept tigers, lions, ligers, bears, and a couple wolves in his backyard. He was pretty cool–and he treated his animals very well but I still couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. Beautiful, powerful creatures trapped behind chainlink eating kibble from a bowl. It just didn’t seem right.
You ain’t kidding, RickJay. A tiger as a pet. Oh, gee, let’s let little Timmy play with the tiger! F***ing morons. I’d charge anyone who has a tiger that lets children near it with deliberately endangering a child. It’s one thing to be stupid with your own life; it’s something else entirely when it’s a child’s life.
Heh, that’s pretty funny. I have this mental image of a half-dozen guys wrestling a fire hose with “kitty” sputtering its way across the kitchen …
It’s not like one of the foremost tiger experts in the world operating in as controlled an environment as he could manufacture didn’t recently exit stage left, carried by his head with body limp by a “pet” tiger. With Ray Horn permanently physically and mentally disabled, you gotta be beyond ignorant to put a Siberian on a leash and next to a kid. His action falls well within the realm of criminal behaviour.
Given that there are probably not 1,000 Siberian tigers left on earth (and that’s actually up quite a bit from 30-40 years ago) you sure hope not.
Actually, I’ve never heard of them shooting a wild animal for that. You shoot dogs because
A) Dogs aren’t wild animals, and can’t be kept apart from people, so there’s no other practical way to deal with a dangerous dog, and
B) We have lots of dogs and can afford to kill mean ones.
A tiger can be sent to a zoo and kept where people can’t get close to it, and it’s worth something, since you can make it part of the global breeding program.
Actually, that’s another reason this guy is a shithead. The only reason we still have Siberian or Sumatran tigers is the global breeding program. Zoos (as well as the more advanced private owners, like Siegfried and Roy) cooperate with each other in getting the tigers to interbreed and create a healthy population. I doubt Asshat McPrivatezoo’s animals are part of the program. He’s wasting healthy tiger DNA.
The trouble is, these backyard tigers are not going to zoos. Every zoo that has space for tigers is maxed out. The problem is not that there are not enough tigers, but that there is not enough space for the tigers we do have. Tigers are actually pretty prolific animals and they breed in captivity. But what do you do with the tiger cubs? You have to have huge amounts of space, and tons of money to provide food and medical care for them. Plus these backyard cats often have severe behavioral and medical problems due to abusive and/or stupid owners. The set of private tiger owners who are not also members of the set of idiots is very small.
I skoff at thee. Pshaw! PSHAW!, I say. Next you’ll be telling me that Calvin adopted Hobbes to compensate for his sexual frustration regarding Suzy, when any fool can see that he had to keep a pet tiger in order to save the world from F-16 flying alien T-Rexes.
Hopefully, they’re sent to places like the International Exotic Feline Sanctuary in Boyd, TX. legolamb and I toured the sanctuary last year and most of the cats they have were taken from private owners.
The story is vague to me now, but a few weeks ago some cat got loose from a zoo. What I remember is what the zoo guy said; that bobcats, panthers, most cats will scoot/hide if they get out. A tiger will eat someone.
Here in Austin, the local zoo USED to be just a small, kiddie-type petting zoo with harmless farm animals, like sheep and goats. Today, they’ve got all sorts of large predators, mainly ones that were taken away from idiots who were keeping them in the back yard or in a trailer park.
Lions, tigers, cougars, bears, you name it, and some wacko has tried to keep them as pets.
The Austin Zoo has had several servals, too, an animal breed I wasn’t familiar with before. A serval looks like a slimmer, sleeker cheetah. Apparently, they got to be a trendy pet, too, among people who were told they’d only get to be the size of a large house cat. Naturally, many people found out in short order that their cute little kitten was a large predator!
I doubt whether any such idiots are reading this thread, but just in case: NOBODY over the age of 10 thinks you’re cool for keeping wild animals in your yard!