The San Francisco Tiger

I am a little surprised at how long the coverage is lasting of a tiger attack at the San Francisco zoo, when one escaped and went after some customers. One guy is dead, and the tiger is also dead, though you have to wonder as to whether it would have been possible to shoot her with a tranquilizer dart instead, plus adding the required four feet more to her restraining wall. Also you have to think once again of the felicity of zoos.

I think of all the happy hours in my childhood and also in my early adulthood that I spent at the zoo in D.C., where my greatest interest was not in the tigers and lions and such but instead was always in the snakes, the poisonous ones. One of the first photos of me, taken by my father, shows me standing somewhere at the zoo, at age 4 or so, smiling and holding what looks to be an apple.

But all the while that I was at the zoo, I always felt sorry for the animals cooped up in there, and I could never reconcile myself to it. On the one hand I and everyone else could never have otherwise seen such exotic beings, and also zoos perform a great service in preserving endangered species, such as panda bears, tigers, and many others. But on the other hand zoos are those most dreadful of structures, prisons.

I guess the preservation thing tips the balance, as does letting people see the animals, because that has to lead to greater support for preserving them and their distant habitats wherever possible. And meanwhile efforts are always being made to keep the animals in zoo habitats that allow them as much freedom as possible. So, the last several times that I was at the Washington Zoo, I enjoyed entering a huge enclosed area in which a visitor could walk under (at some small risk) and through all these different species of colorful small birds that were singing and swooping about and perching in trees and such, while only thin strips of plastic hung vertically over the entrances kept them from escaping. And I wondered whether the snakes really cared, as long as they were given enough to eat. They never seemed much interested in moving about anyway.

Tigers were a different story. Quite often they paced about, looking for a way out, their eyes seeming to be filled with wonder as to what had happened to all the miles that their ancestors traveled, searching for the thrill of the kill. Their restlessness was the same as that of a hungry house cat.

I think of the physical equipment of a domestic cat as being such that it is able to go anywhere it chooses, and it only chooses not to because it is so lazy, contrary, practical, and mysterious, in that order. I wonder if a tiger, looking as it does only like a very large tabby, is similarly able -- or would be if it wasn't prevented from making proportional leaps and bounds and strolling along on the thinnest of edges only by its size and weight.

The continued news coverage, which is now focusing on the chance that the tiger was taunted, gives me the definite impression that the two guys who were mauled and even their friend who died are not getting much sympathy. Instead their experience is only putting an exciting edge on the always interesting experience of visiting a zoo, plus showing the folly of not recognizing that a tiger is a cat with attitude and the equipment to back it up, decisively, plus zoos are places for admiration and prayer and not for teasing.