There was a TV series a few years back that documented lots of the cases already mentioned in this thread. I remember the episode on Travis the chimp where they played the 9-1-1 call and you can hear the animal going nuts in the background.
Chimps and tigers seemed to be the most often portrayed pets that turned on their owners on that show.
I think that’s a bit complacent. People get killed by cows (trampling) and get kicked by horses. Farm pigs can be very dangerous.
Even a domestic cat bite can kill you if you don’t have access to antibiotics.
It helps to distinguish tamed animals and domesticated animals. And there isn’t a single answer as it depends on what kind of animal it is, the characteristics that particular animal has, and which human it’s interacting with under what circumstances. The animals mentioned in the OP (Lions/Tigers/Bears) are not domesticated, even if born in captivity. And the type of human conditioning they receive can also vary; they can be tamed, trained, habituated, socialized… all of which mean different things and would give different results.
You’ll never be “safe” around a fully domesticated fighting bull that sees humans every day if it’s life; domesticated isn’t the same as tame. You might be ok around a lion cub you raised and performed with it’s whole life… if you’re the trainer or near the trainer, so wild animals can be tamed. But, I wouldn’t get out of the car if that lion cub spent most of it’s life in a game reserve conditioned to seeing humans daily yet made a living hunting and fending for it’s self as other lions do.
Let as say you have achieved domesticity in your pet lion. He’s your pal.
I dunno about you, but once in a while, when I snip one of my cats claws too close, or rub their tummy wrong, they swipe or grab, resulting in a couple bandaids. If instead it’s Leo, it results in a ER visit or your death.
Yes - from a large carnivore even a mild swipe or nip, delivered with playful intention, could be deadly.
Anecdotes:
I have known two people who kept pet ocelots. Both of them required a couple hundred stitches before getting rid of their pets.
I also knew a caretaker of Sigfreid and Roy’s tigers who was seriously injured by one of their animals years before Roy was mutilated by one.
I’ve been doing cat rescue for longer than I’d like to admit. Domestic house cats, little fluffy animals, not lions or tigers. I rarely handle an unknown cat without gloves and long sleeves because while they might be small, they have lots of pointy ends and are twisty and bendy. Feral cats get even more respect/fear. The only time I touch them is when they have been drugged into submission.
If a little housecat can kick my butt without breaking a sweat, I certainly wouldn’t trust a “tame” lion or tiger.
Cecil Sez:
Emphasis mine.
I dunno about “kicking my butt” but a *lot *of bandaids have been used…
I watched an interview with Doug Seus (a well-know and very good Hollywood animal actor trainer who works with all sorts of dangerous animals) where he described the subtle body language and cues that his grizzly bears used when getting pushy. It does seem like there’s a lot of knowledge and observation required to be safe around dangerous animals… techniques and expertise most people simply don’t have or even know exists.
It’s not just the size, claws/teeth, aggression, etc that makes an animal dangerous; it’s the human’s lack of being able to read the situation and how particular species show signs of what’s building up.
Even Pit Bulls and the like, which are of an entirely domesticated species, may kill more people than all the “wild animals” in captivity together. You cannot predict the behavior of an animal. In 1900, the number of people killed by horses may have larger per capita than those killed by automobiles today. I have no citation, but people in that era had to be constantly vigilant of the danger of horses on city streets and the countryside.
I have known several cats, from a couple we had as kids, a couple my mom has had over the years, and a couple that friends kept. Every one of those cats, no matter how loving or permissive - and my sister’s cat let us dress her in a doll’s dress a few times - at some point got pissed off and expressed itself with claws and teeth.
House cats tend to use teeth and forelimbs to get a solid grip, then employ their hind legs in a raking fashion, as if to disembowel their victim. Said victim being my arm.
And that’s house cats. No way a full grown tiger or lion is going to always be in a good mood. Where a house cat might give a nip of displeasure, from an adult lion or tiger that’s going to be severe. Full out drawing blood attacks happen, too.
I still have four puncture wound scars from a childhood pet cat who dug his teeth his teeth into my arm and wouldn’t let go until I submerged him in water.
One should not trust anecdotes, except as single data points. There are wild animals that lived full lives as pets, and have never killed their owners, and others that have killed them, or attacked them. If anecdotes are your only data, then you have to accept that “Wild Animal behavior is not totally predictable”. Even so-called gentle animals like Gorillas and Elephants and Dolphins have been known to attack people. Heck, Dolphins are like the low-lifes of the animal kingdom and have been seen acting as a team to separate females from a herd (or whatever they are called) to have non-consensual sex with them (ie. rape).
On the other side, though, there are certainly stories of wild animals exercising their ‘maternal instincts’ to protect a child that somehow found its way into the gorilla enclosure at the zoo. I don’t think that anyone seriously wants their child to fall into the gorilla cage of a zoo, nor would they trust (and rightfully so) the safety of their child to any wild animal. So let’s just (for now) peg this up to the unpredictability of wild animals.
Actually, zebras and wild horses are different from the get go. See Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond who makes the point that Africa had the unfortunate luck of having zebras, which can’t be domesticated.
I knew a guy once who had a pair of zebras that he trained to drive. (In equestrian-ese that means pull a cart or something, as a team of horses pulled a stagecoach.) He used to drive them around the farm occasionally. Even more occasionally he would let a passenger or two join him on the cart. The zebras were not very reliable and “a good drive” consisted of a short out-and-back with no runaways and no bucking and no cart overturning.
One of the two would also tolerate a saddle and a rider, sometimes. And for variable iterations of “for a short time”.
But these were essentially wild animals. I’m sure they were both captive born. But I’m also sure that only a handful of generations separated them from the savannahs of Africa. I really do not know what might result if zebras were subjected to a rigorous selective breeding program with only the most tractable 1% bred to produce the next generation. Given a forced generation time of only 3 or 4 years (enough time to breed a foal, produce it, raise it enough to make a selection for next breeding, then repeat) it would surely be a long term experiment that might not show significant results in a human lifetime. But all animals we now consider domesticated have been subjected to selection for a lot longer than a human lifetime. So my jury is still out on zebras.
See http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/dog/dog.htm for an example of zebras driven four-in-hand.
OMG! Four-in-hand zebras! Superlative points to “Mr Hardy”.
That seems like an utterly bizarre argument. Were the dogs allegedly homophobic or something?
I can’t even imagine how the victim’s sexual orientation could possibly be relevant to a dog attack.
The guy was a nut case, anti-everybody type.