Monday, February 16, 2015

i think you need to be careful with this animal.

he was obviously expecting you to throw him meat, and turned his back on you when you didn't. intentional or not, that's teasing it, and teasing a tiger isn't a good idea. it demonstrated it's displeasure.

the big area may seem like a good idea, but you kind of can't have it both ways with a "pet" tiger. you either need to leave it in your house and treat it like a dog, or you need to leave it in an enclosure and treat it like a wild animal. the reason is that the tiger is spending it's "alone time" being a tiger, rather than being a dog or a pet, which enforces various instinctual tiger habits. like eating humans, for example, which happen to be a part of a tiger's natural diet. there's an evolutionary relationship, there; a predator-prey relationship. don't forget that. but it's not really a consequence of a tiger being "wild" - the same thing happens when you leave a dog outside all of the time.

it's easy to think "a tiger should have a big area". and maybe that's true. but, a tiger in a big area stops being a pet and starts being a tiger. what's important is that that shift in mindset is not just understood abstractly but enforced concretely.

it seems like you want to put a lot of effort into this thing. and it's easy to anthropomorphize. but i see a lot of warning signs in this video, and need to request extreme caution.