# Why do people insist on treating deadly wild animals like pets? **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [August 19, 2005, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737 "2005-08-19T13:36:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Fish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/bc8723/32.png) [@Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fish)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2005, 7:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/41 "2005-08-19T19:34:26Z")
“We **found** the tiger skin in a bicycle shop in Cairo! The owner wanted us to take it to Dar es Salaam…” “No no no.” “No, that’s not it. We’re doing it on a bet.” “God told us to do it.” “To tell the truth we’re _completely_ mad.” ---
**Author:** ![rjung](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/45deac/32.png) [@rjung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjung)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2005, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/42 "2005-08-19T19:58:16Z")
“Just think of it as evolution in action.” (Was it Larry Niven who said that?) ---
**Author:** ![The\_Weird\_One](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@The\_Weird\_One](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Weird_One)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2005, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/43 "2005-08-19T20:01:08Z")
WRT putting down the tiger, the article does make it sound like the tiger was killed in the course of trying to rescue the girl. (Now that I think about it, it must be hard as hell to stop an attacking tiger _without_ killing it.) On a related note, I recently read [Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743247698/qid=1124481338/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-1584986-5875936?v=glance&s=books&n=507846). She says that large predators such as lions and tigers are kept under control by their handlers’ never allowing the animals to realize their own strength. If they “attack” a person for a scene in a movie, or even just knock someone down accidently, they can’t be handled any longer because the illusion of human control has been shattered and the animal realizes that it is more powerful than its handler. ---
**Author:** ![Ponder\_Stibbons](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ponder_stibbons/32/343_2.png) [@Ponder\_Stibbons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ponder_Stibbons)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2005, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/44 "2005-08-19T20:08:07Z")
> [@rjung](#): > > “Just think of it as evolution in action.” > > (Was it Larry Niven who said that?) Hard to tell. It might have been [Jerry Pournell](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671532278/qid=1124482427/sr=1-42/ref=sr_1_42/104-6395756-4168769?v=glance&s=books). It was definitely one of them, though. ---
**Author:** ![Cervaise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cervaise/32/16693_2.png) [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2005, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/45 "2005-08-19T21:44:25Z")
> [@NDP](#): > > Granted, there’s a big difference between a tiger and a lynx but neither one would be a good lap cat. Dude here at work has a serval in his house. Guess he doesn’t like his kids too much. ---
**Author:** ![ouryL](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ouryl/32/6067_2.png) [@ouryL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ouryL)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2005, 11:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/46 "2005-08-19T23:57:38Z")
[Then there’s this :wally .](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427312/) ---
**Author:** ![Stephe96](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bbe5ce/32.png) [@Stephe96](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stephe96)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2005, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/47 "2005-08-20T00:08:06Z")
Don’t we all remember the old _SNL_ skit where Dan Aykroyd played the author of the book, _Mauled_? He gave some good advice on that: 1. Don’t ride the bears 2. Don’t dress the bears in cute clothes 3. And never, ever try to feed a bear a marshmellow with your mouth ---
**Author:** ![ltfire](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ea924/32.png) [@ltfire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ltfire)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2005, 12:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/48 "2005-08-20T00:16:23Z")
I don’t know if this story ever made it out of N.Y. City, but the media had a ball with it. Local TV showed SWAT cops repelling off of fire escapes trying to get a clean shot. Hilarious. > **[Breaking News, World News, US and Local News - NY Daily News - New York Daily...](https://www.nydailynews.com/)** > > Find breaking US news, local New York news coverage, sports, entertainment news, celebrity gossip, autos, videos and photos at nydailynews.com. ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2005, 1:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/49 "2005-08-20T01:06:15Z")
> [@ouryL](#): > > [Then there’s this :wally .](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427312/) [This also compliments of Steve Irwin](http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Steve-Irwin-baby-concerns-prompt-law-change/2005/02/23/1109046983142.html?oneclick=true) ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2005, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/50 "2005-08-20T01:08:16Z")
Let’s try that again [Steve Irwin baby concerns prompt law change](http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Steve-Irwin-baby-concerns-prompt-law-change/2005/02/23/1109046983142.html) ---
**Author:** ![Zebra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/c0e974/32.png) [@Zebra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zebra)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2005, 3:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/51 "2005-08-20T03:50:52Z")
I did see a special (national geographic?) about a man who took people raised tigers and taught them to live in the wild on a very large, fenced in preserve. (I believe there was a herd of very unlucky goats. Any way, this guy has been raising these tigers and now he has to teach them to hunt. He stops feeding them so they get hungry enough to go after the goats and they have to learn how to stalk and track and such. After the first kill, the trainer still has to assert his dominance, as their lessons aren’t done, so he took the carcas away from the tiger that was eating it. Hungry tiger, eating his first kill, and this guy walks up and takes it away from the tiger. Truely, this man has balls. ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2005, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/52 "2005-08-20T05:32:23Z")
> [@Zebra](#): > > Hungry tiger, eating his first kill, and this guy walks up and takes it away from the tiger. > > Truely, this man has balls. [Unfortunately this man does not](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/04/national/main678061.shtml) ---
**Author:** ![Ogre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/ecb155/32.png) [@Ogre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ogre)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2005, 5:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/53 "2005-08-20T05:50:40Z")
> [@](#): > > In 2000, after city prosecutors decided to drop charges against the Davises in Moe’s 1999 attack, St. James Davis said Moe was not a threat to the public and attacked only when provoked. > > “Animals bite, people bite, Mike Tyson bites. So what?” he said. Karma bites like a motherfucker. ---
**Author:** ![zagloba](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/977dab/32.png) [@zagloba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zagloba)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2005, 7:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/54 "2005-08-20T07:40:42Z")
When I was a freshman in college in southern California, one of the seniors had a pet lioness. He “only” brought it to campus once or twice – I was never that close to her, nor did I know him very well. I’ve seen photos of him rolling around on the ground with her. I think he had her on some sort of restraint when on campus. Seems like it would have been illegal to parade her around Pasadena even if it was on a private university campus in 1978. I didn’t know enough to be afraid then. Now I’d be very concerned to have such a beast in the dorm or outdoors in an unfenced area. ---
**Author:** ![Dan\_Norder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4af34b/32.png) [@Dan\_Norder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dan_Norder)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2005, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/55 "2005-08-20T19:45:42Z")
> [@Loopydude](#): > > Unfortunately, some carnivores, once they get a taste of human, think to themselves “That ain’t half bad!”, and are tempted to go for seconds when the opportunity presents. This is the Straight Dope so I’ll have to go with “Cite?” as I always thought that was just another old wive’s tale. ---
**Author:** ![Padeye](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a9a28c/32.png) [@Padeye](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Padeye)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2005, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/56 "2005-08-20T20:44:30Z")
As Chris Rock said about Roy Horn’s mauling, the tiger didn’t go crazy, it went tiger. [Lore speaks on the topic](http://www.lorebrandcomics.com/onlinecasinos.html) I think tigers are beautiful in part because they are wild animals. No amount of training changes that. I’ll appreciate them from a distance. My domestic, short hair, gray and white toy tiger is small enough that I can trim her claws even when she isn’t in the mood. ---
**Author:** ![blackhobyah](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/41988e/32.png) [@blackhobyah](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blackhobyah)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2005, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/57 "2005-08-20T21:59:26Z")
> [@Zebra](#): > > I did see a special (national geographic?) about a man who took people raised tigers and taught them to live in the wild on a very large, fenced in preserve. (I believe there was a herd of very unlucky goats. Would this be the extraordinary [Arjan Singh](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/4162734.stm)? I have a couple of books written by him, about his work at Tiger Haven, and his relationship with his tigers, even after they have returned to the wild, is breath-taking, and sometimes heart-breaking. But he isn’t keeping tigers as pets, his aim is to return them to their wild lives. > [@](#): > > Originally Posted by Loopydude > Unfortunately, some carnivores, once they get a taste of human, think to themselves “That ain’t half bad!”, and are tempted to go for seconds when the opportunity presents. I don’t think it works quite that the tiger decides it likes human flesh, although it has been suggested that eating unburied corpses has taught tigers to enjoy humans. I dunno if that makes sense since it’s a bit of an intellectual leap for a predator and I don’t know that tigers are usually scavengers. In cases where big cats have turned man (and woman) eater, it hasn’t had much to do with the taste of humans. The reasons seem to be more that humans are easy prey because they have poor senses (compared to say, an antelope) and they can’t run fast . In areas where the tiger’s environment is being invaded by human endeavours, people are often in a position where they are easy targets (bending over crops, etc). Human invasion of a tiger’s habitat can also mean a loss of natural prey for a tiger. In some instances injury to tigers means that they are unable to hunt their usual prey. It seems also that there were some instances where a mother, having learned for whatever reason, that humans were easy to catch, taught this to her cubs. There’s a discussion of the causes of man-eating [here](http://www.lairweb.org.nz/tiger/maneating.html). If you’re at all interested in the topic, you could do a lot worse than read Jim Corbett’s books about his experiences hunting man-eating tigers. I first read them as a child and they terrified me, but I’ve read them since, and enjoyed them for Corbett’s understanding and affection for the natural world, including tigers. He started off as a big-game hunter and ended his life as a committed conservationist. I used to hang out of some lists for people who kept big cats … some were serious shelters for the extraordinary number of big cats bought as pets and abandoned when they got too big and dangerous to handle, but some of the posters were in it for the macho posturing and were not really to sort of person you’d want keeping and handling a dangerous, wild animal. It’s a bit scary how many big cats are bought as pets … Tippi Hedren’s (Melanie Griffith’s mother) runs [Shambala](http://www.shambala.org/) which rescues abandoned big cats. If you can find the book, “The Cats of Shambala” makes a fascinating read, and has some amazing pictures. My favourite is of a lion coming through the window of Hedren’s suburban house, landing in the sink. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2005, 2:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/58 "2005-08-21T02:59:45Z")
> [@Finagle](#): > > Reuters claims it was a [Bengal](http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/08/18/D8C2FRJ02.html) tiger. So who knows? The basic difference between a Bengal and a Siberian tiger is that the Bengal tiger weighs, oh, about 450 pounds on average, and the Siberian’s a little closer to 500. In other words, when one of those big sons o’ bitches decides to eat you, there’s really no difference at all. ---
**Author:** ![Cat\_Whisperer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cat_whisperer/32/4839_2.png) [@Cat\_Whisperer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cat_Whisperer)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2005, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/59 "2005-08-21T04:31:29Z")
We went to “Behind the Scenes with Tigers” at our local zoo last year. It was great, and very informative. At no point were we anywhere near being in the same cages as the tigers - we weren’t even allowed to lean on the enclosure. The tiger keepers have zero intimate contact with the tigers to keep the tigers in as wild a state as possible, and think very little of people who keep animals like tigers as "pets’. Like someone said earlier, the tragedy here is the girl who didn’t know better and the tiger who paid the price for other people’s ignorance. Frankly, with 6 billion humans in the world and around 8,000 tigers, the real crime here is killing that extremely valuable cat. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2005, 5:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737/60 "2005-08-21T05:07:47Z")
> [@featherlou](#): > > We went to “Behind the Scenes with Tigers” at our local zoo last year. It was great, and very informative. At no point were we anywhere near being in the same cages as the tigers - we weren’t even allowed to lean on the enclosure. The tiger keepers have zero intimate contact with the tigers to keep the tigers in as wild a state as possible, and think very little of people who keep animals like tigers as "pets’. Like someone said earlier, the tragedy here is the girl who didn’t know better and the tiger who paid the price for other people’s ignorance. Frankly, with 6 billion humans in the world and around 8,000 tigers, the real crime here is killing that extremely valuable cat. But are “pet” tigers of unknown breeding–and therefore probably not even suitable for preserving genetic diversity in captive breeding programs–really that valuable? It was my understanding that tigers (and lions) actually breed very easily, both in the wild and in captivity (unlike, say, cheetahs), and that this is why such an amazing number of people seem to have one in a cage in their back yard. The problem isn’t that we can’t facilitate the making of more tigers, but rather that there isn’t any place for them to GO. It’s habitat shrinkage that is destroying the tiger, not a lack of actual tigers. Find the hundreds and hundreds of square miles of range needed, and we could help tigers fill it back up PDQ. But that land just isn’t there anymore. So from that point of view, loosing a tiger really doesn’t effect the long term survivability of the species at all. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-insist-on-treating-deadly-wild-animals-like-pets/317737.md?page=4)