Why it’s not a good idea to keep a tiger as a pet

Tigers are among the most beautiful animals on earth. It's no wonder that some people are fascinated by them and feel a desire to keep them as pets. However, tigers are not domesticated animals. Small tiger cubs will soon grow up to weigh hundreds of pounds, and they can easily overpower and kill a person. Furthermore, because tigers are endangered, it is especially important to the overall tiger population and the ecosystem for more tigers to live in the wild.

Don't get a tiger

Tigers are stunning creatures, but their care and feeding is a delicate matter that requires heroic effort. They can kill their human keepers, they are difficult to capture once they've escaped, and because of this, a license is generally required to keep one. If you are inclined to keep a cat, an animal shelter will have a small one for you. (Millions of unwanted cats are euthanized in the United States each year.) If you are inclined to help tigers, a good start would be a donation to a wildlife charity or to an organization like the Shambala Preserve that takes large cats from people "who realize they have purchased an animal they can no longer handle".

For kids, check out the book Big Cats Are Not Pets! by Julie S. Marzolf.

But if you do have a tiger, and if you're married, I guess you should write a tiger custody agreement so you know who will take care of it in the event of a divorce.

Tigers can turn on their human keepers

Tigers occasionally maul their keepers. In 1998, in Florida, a tiger put Richard Chipperfield in critical condition. It was shot by Graham Chipperfield. The brothers were trainers for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.


In 2003, Antoine Yates was mauled by a 500-pound tiger that he secretly kept in his apartment in a Harlem housing project. His brother found him injured on the floor and brought him to the hospital. To capture the tiger, police had to rappel down the side of the apartment building with a tranquilizer gun. Yates served six months in jail for endangerment.

He fondly explained his relationship with the tiger, "Ming": "To be close to such a beautiful animal 24 hours a day is magical. I began to really understand a big cat. At that point I was ready to disconnect from the world."

Also in 2003, a leashed white tiger mauled Roy Horn during a performance in Las Vegas. Horn, who had performed with tigers for three decades, lost enough blood to put him in critical condition.


In December 2013, a circus tiger mauled its trainer, Danny Gottani, in front of spectators in Madrid, including Gottani's own mother. Gottani had nearly two decades of experience with tigers. His injuries were not life-threatening. A spectator captured cell phone footage of the mauling.


Tigers are difficult to contain

One might think that the risk could be minimized simply by keeping the animal in a cage. It's not quite that simple. It's one thing to put a tiger in a box, and another thing to keep the box sealed.

In 1893, the Walter L. Main Circus Train derailed in Pennsylvania as it traveled downhill, leading to the escape of many exotic animals. One tiger entered a barn where it killed a cow and scared away the milkmaid. The farmer, Alfred Thomas, shot it.

The obvious danger presented by captive tigers was alluring to one depressed man who climbed into a tiger enclosure in China in a suicide attempt in 2014. (The tiger dragged him but refused to eat him.)

In the wild, tigers rarely bother humans. However, once a tiger learns to stalk humans as prey, it becomes a menace. A Royal Bengal tiger killed 10 people in Northern India over just two months in early 2014 and remained on the loose. Villagers were intent on finding and shooting the rogue animal, but it is easier said than done.

Celebrities who are known to have tigers


Tigers are expensive, and celebrities sometimes purchase them as status symbols or curiosities. These arrangements are usually short-term, as keeping a tiger is a lot of work.


An article in USA Today in 2003 reported that Michael Jackson kept two tigers ("Thriller" and "Sabu") on his Neverland Ranch; Mike Tyson kept three tigers at home ("Kenya," "Storm" and "Boris"); and Paris Hilton kept a mostly untamed tiger ("London"). All of these tigers were subsequently sent to live elsewhere. Hilton, whose TV show is ironically called "The Simple Life," wisely said of her tiger: "I don't have it anymore...[It] got too big, and if it ever got loose I'd be in so much trouble."

A four-month-old female tiger cub was given to Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko during her presidential campaign in 2009. Tymoshenko became a political prisoner, and the tiger, who had been named "Tigryulia" during its stint as campaign mascot, was sent to a zoo, where it gave birth to four cubs in 2012.


In 1837, U.S. President Martin van Buren was sent a pair of tiger cubs by the Sultan of Oman. Congress did not permit van Buren to keep the tigers and had them sent to a zoo.

Tigers are endangered

Tigers are endangered in the wild. The Christian Science Monitor reported in 2011 that more tigers live in captivity in the United States than roam wild in all the world: "Because of a flourishing trade in exotic animals, there are an estimated 5,000 privately owned Bengal tigers in the U.S. There are only 3,600 Bengal tigers left in the wild."

In addition for the demand for tigers as pets, the demand for products made from slaughtered tigers leaves them vulnerable to hunters. For example, on Sept. 4, 2012, the HuffingtonPost reported:
 "Police have seized four baby tigers and more than 100 pangolins being transported in a car in central Vietnam...Tiger bones are used in Vietnam to make a traditional painkiller that sells for several hundred dollars an ounce." Superstitions about the curative properties of tiger products thus sadly contribute to the animals' decline.


This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Feb. 27, 2014.

Tiger image by Eddy Van 3000 from in Flanders fields - Belgiquistan - United Tribes ov Europe (Sleeping beauty, dreaming of lots of meat.) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Martel's Tiger eats Ockham's Razor

The movie Life of Pi is faithful to Yann Martel's award-winning novel of the same name.  Fans have had to wait since the book's 2001 publication for a film adaptation, finally released in 2012, about a boy trapped in a lifeboat with a tiger after their menagerie-bearing cargo ship sinks in the Pacific Ocean.  The human-tiger interaction was made possible by CGI technology and is available with and without 3-D.  The animal looks quite real, and actor Suraj Sharma is inspiring in his role as the persistently God-directed boy who must tame the tiger.  The story is told as a flashback as the adult narrator relives his experiences.  (Would-be filmgoers prone to seasickness might want to stay home on dry land.)

Before the shipwreck, the boy's father warns him not to anthropomorphize the zoo tiger.  "When you look into his eyes, you're seeing your own emotions reflected back at you – nothing else," the rationalist father maintains.  The viewers are thus reminded of the need to struggle with their own assumptions about the tiger's behavior throughout the movie.  This adds depth to the viewers' likely experience of being unable to look away from the tiger's gaze during the riveting journey.

Some of the book's more memorable elements were left out, probably because they would have been too disturbing for a popular audience.  The book's raw depiction of starvation is merely suggested by a brief view of a skin-and-bones animated tiger.  The period of hallucination also feels abbreviated compared to what was in the book, but that is probably a good thing.  Likely for the sake of the PG rating, gone are the excruciating details about bowel movements as a consequence of surviving on raw fish and being confined to a small boat.  Also likely for purposes of keeping the film appropriate and comprehensible to children, a failed rescue attempt with gruesome results was entirely omitted, as was the narrator's temporary blindness due to the ravages of exposure.  (Were it a different kind of film, it might have been interesting to attempt to depict the narrator's blindness as he floated alone on a sparkling ocean he couldn't see.)

So, although purists may quibble over how the movie differs from the book, the adaptation was done well, and every moment of the movie is entertaining.  Its entertainment value, in fact, is an essential part of its purpose and message.

At the conclusion of the movie, investigators are skeptical of the rescued boy's story and demand from him "a story we can all believe."  "A story without things you've never seen before," the boy clarifies.  "That's right," the investigators agree.  The intimation is that many people will only believe what they already know how to believe.  The movie challenges this practical approach, highlighting instead the value of what entertains and inspires people, if they will only suspend their disbelief.

The proposition that the story will "make you believe in God," which is more subtle in the novel, is heavy-handed in the movie.  This lofty promise could make the film popular with a religious audience.

The story does indeed embody an argument for God, but it's not an overriding, knock-down argument.  The events involving the tiger in the lifeboat are shown at length.  A briefly offered competing narrative – provided verbally, not visually – is that the boy was in a lifeboat with some human survivors until they killed each other, and then he was alone, with no tiger.  The provided conclusion is that, because the hero was stranded on a lifeboat with no other human being, he is the only person who can provide a narrative about what happened during that time, and since it makes no difference in the end what really happened, the best criterion for judgment is what makes the best story.

"So it is with God," viewers are told.  Why not believe the better story?  The one with a tiger?  The one with a God?

This raises the question of what makes one story "better" than another.  Is it simply the story that is more entertaining?  It cannot be so; the entertainment value of a theistic narrative would be a poor basis for deciding the factual matter of whether God exists.

According to Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times, "so magical and mystical is this parable, it's as if the filmmaker has the philosopher's stone." Philosophically, this is only a version of the ontological argument, in which God is deemed to exist because he is defined as existing:  QED.

The philosophical principle of Ockham's Razor says that, if two explanations are equally good, one should gravitate toward the simpler narrative that makes fewer assumptions.  The principle one might call Martel's Tiger is in direct competition:  the grander the assumption, the better the story, which is the option that should be embraced.  In this way, the film opens up – but does not directly address – meaningful questions about the role of story in religious narratives.

After being treated to two hours of stunning animation, the viewer must acknowledge that the drama that illustrates courage, hope, and amazement and features charismatic animals is indeed a "better story" than a short, depressing sketch of a shipwreck bringing out the worst in human nature.  This does not, however, mean that the viewer must agree that God exists.  Thus Nick Schager's review in the Dallas Observer rightly referred to film's ending as its "nadir".

There is a third story option:  many would say that the tiger story is improved after it is interpreted it as an allegory in which the animals represent humans.  So might it be with God.  If one finds that stories with supernatural elements are more entertaining, educational, and ultimately redemptive when they are understood as allegories, then, according to the law of Martel's Tiger, God could be best understood as a useful fiction.

As this third option is not made explicit in the movie, it will probably not be a major part of most discussions about the movie.  Some viewers will no doubt manage the pabulous, incorrect take-away message that God must exist because the boy could not have survived his ordeal without God's help, as this is more consistent with the way God is discussed in American culture.

"God, I give myself to you," the hero says, floating in calm sea water that is at last ethereal and luminous, barely separated from the sky ringed by endless clouds, a Renaissance heaven.  "I am your vessel.  Whatever comes, I want to know.  Show me."

If some viewers find that moment more annoying than transformative, more arresting will be the Hinduism-inspired vision of the entire universe inside the god Vishnu's mouth, when all the boy's visible world consists of a bioluminescent ocean and a tiger's jaws.  The movie has something for everyone brave enough to watch it.

Originally posted to Helium Network on Nov. 23, 2012.

Image: Tiger at the Dublin Zoo, 1936. From the collection of the National Library of Ireland. © No known copyright restrictions. Flickr.