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Three recent headlines: Roy mauled by white tiger. Tiger found in Harlem apartment. Self-taught bear "expert" mauled and killed by bear.

Listen up, people. Wild animals are wild animals. Period. I don't care if you've raised them since they were newborns; I don't care if you've studied them for years; I don't care if they've never hurt you before; I don't care if they've been in captivity for five generations. They DO NOT think of you as "one of them." They will not, ever. NOT EVER. Do you know why? Because you aren't!! You are a human, an essentially small and weak animal. And all it takes is a moment, a single moment, when the animal in question looks at you and thinks to itself "Hmm. Food." At that point instinct takes over. The animal doesn't care, or remember, that you raised it and fed it and played with it. It doesn't care, or remember, anything about you other than, for that moment, you look like prey.

Big carnivores are opportunistic hunters. That means that, while they may have a preferred method for hunting food (tigers, for example, are stalkers, not chasers. They are not very fast, for a cat, and need to sneak up as close as they can to their prey), if they're just standing around one day and notice that food happens to be standing right next to them, they'll take the opportunity. Tigers kill food by jumping on it, grabbing it by the throat, and dragging it on the ground. Sound familiar? They do this in the hope of suffocating the prey with a minimum of blood. The dragging facilitates breaking the neck and effectively increases the strain on the prey's windpipe, leading to quicker strangulation. The tiger  that mauled Roy wasn't "mad" at him, nor was he "playing", or "protecting" or anything of the sort. He was momentarily distracted, then looked back at Roy and thought "I'm a might peckish and there happens to be food standing right next to me."

This can happen with any so-called "tame" predator at any time. It is in the nature of the animal. Your wolfdog that you have had for seven years and has been a beloved house pet and whom your five-year old daughter has played with every day of her life since she was born - one day when she's walking up the driveway on her way home your wolfdog glances at her, and instead of thinking "oh there's the human that feeds me and plays with me," thinks instead "oh, food." And that's it. Instinct takes over and the human is dead or horribly mauled.

None of this is the animals' "fault." It's *your fault*! It's your fault for anthromorphizing animals to the extent that you project your feelings for them onto them. It's your fault for thinking that the animals' love for you is the over-riding thing it feels, for thinking that your affection and care for the animal will somehow overcome *hundreds upon hundreds of generations of breeding that tell it that its job is to hunt down, kill, and eat animals smaller and weaker than itself.* This is what predators do, people. Do you think that the first cave-man that fed scraps to a dog to keep it around to hunt vermin trusted that dog, even for a moment? No, he did not. He knew better. Now, thousands of generations of selective breeding later, most dogs can be trusted. But it takes thousands of years for an animal to evolve to that point. Raising an animal from birth to adulthood doesn't change anything, it cannot change the innate hardwiring of the predator-prey relationship.

Seigfried and Roy were lucky for thirty years. Part of that is that all white tigers are hopelessly inbred and in general, astonishingly stupid, for cats. Their docility is in part a result of that inbreeding. But still, somewhere deep in their genetic makeup, remains the very basic predator instinct. Five, six, seven, ten, twenty generations of breeding isn't enough to erase it. And all it takes is a moment. Just one second in time, just one, for your beloved animal to look at you and have the neurons that fire for that behavior suddenly 'trip'. And there you are...food.

There are more tigers in captivity in the United States than there are worldwide in the wild. Every single one of them is the potential for disaster, just waiting to happen. Yes, in licensed zoos the potential is minimal, because trained people know that they are dealing with predators and they take appropriate precautions. Tigers raised and trained by competent animal trainers pose little risk, as the trainers, too, are aware of the potential danger and take measures to keep it to a minimum. But private citizens have *NO BUSINESS* keeping a large predator for a pet!!! They DO NOT belong in your house, in your neighborhood, in your yard! If you love them and respect them as much as you say you do, admire them for what they are, some of nature's most efficient killing machines - don't try to make them into cuddly pets! They are not pets! Nor will they ever be nor should they be! Love tigers? Great, then for god's sake send money to tiger conservation organizations! Volunteer your time to raise money for them if you don't have it! Do anything you want EXCEPT KEEP A TIGER FOR A PET!! If every single person who owned or bought and sold tigers for the pet trade instead devoted those resources to preserving tigers in the wild, we would not have basically lost three of the five sub-species of tiger that used to exist. We would not have one of the world's most beautiful and deadly animals hovering on the verge of extinction. We would not be faced with the task of one day explaining to our children how we let such a magnificent creature disappear from the wilderness of the earth.