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The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

People are complicated. Love is not.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

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They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

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They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Joe Lieberman disappointingly reemerged to remind us that he’s still alive.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

You are here: Home / Nature & Respite / Only in America Open Thread: The Houston Tiger Is Safe

Only in America Open Thread: The Houston Tiger Is Safe

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Poor baby. Best outcome for all concerned, IMO, including the aspirational idiots who swapped him around. From the AP:

A tiger that frightened residents after it was last seen briefly wandering around a Houston neighborhood has been found after a nearly week-long search and appears to be unharmed, police announced Saturday evening.

In a short video tweeted by Houston police, Cmdr. Ron Borza can be seen sitting next to the tiger, petting the animal and saying it has been a long week searching for it.

“But we got him, and he’s healthy,” Borza said as the wife of the man police allege is the animal’s owner sat next to him and fed the tiger with a baby bottle. The tiger was being held at BARC, the city of Houston’s animal shelter, but was expected to be taken Sunday morning to the Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch, an animal sanctuary in Murchison, Texas, located southeast of Dallas…

At a news conference later Saturday evening, Borza said that Cuevas’ wife, Giorgiana, turned over the tiger to police on Saturday after a friend of hers reached out to officials at BARC.

“It is Victor’s tiger. That’s what I was told by (Giorgiana Cuevas) … She says they’ve had that animal for nine months,” Borza said. He alleged that the tiger was passed around to different people but that Cuevas’ wife knew where the tiger was at all times this week as authorities searched for it.

Police are still trying to determine where exactly the tiger was held this week and if any charges related to having the tiger will be filed. Tigers are not allowed within Houston city limits under a city ordinance unless the handler, such as a zoo, is licensed to have exotic animals…

CNN has a more detailed story, concluding:

… On Sunday, the tiger was being taken to its new home at Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch, an animal sanctuary about 200 miles north in Murchison, Texas.

The sanctuary, which is part of the Humane Society of the United States, houses more than 800 animals, including other tigers found in Texas like Loki, who was discovered in a cage in an abandoned home in Houston in 2019.

“We are happy to take India back home to Black Beauty, where he will be introduced into a half-acre, naturally-wooded habitat, with a pool, trees, platform and a proper nutritious diet,” the sanctuary’s senior director, Noelle Almrud, told reporters Sunday morning as the tiger paced in his transport trailer a few feet away.

The journey was expected to take about three hours, Almrud said, with a few stops along the way to check on India. The tiger hasn’t had a full examination, but Almrud said the animal looked healthy. When Inda arrives at the sanctuary, he’ll be introduced to his own den to acclimate to the environment before being put in his new habitat.

Whether India will have any interaction with other tigers is up in the air. India will be in quarantine for the first 30 days to make sure he won’t pass any illness on to other animals, Almrud said. Then he will have visual contact with other tigers, but anything beyond that will depend on the animals’ personalities.

“It’s not always easy to introduce tigers together especially as they’re older,” Almrud said, “but we’ll just play it by ear and see if he’s interested in meeting any of our other tigers.”

Reader Interactions

57Comments

  3. 3.

    debbie

    From what I’ve read about tigers, they’re pretty much solitary beings. Though I guess India’s  been acclimated to humans.

  4. 4.

    Anonymous At Work

    Even if Houston is only nominally part of Texas, I still feel weirded out that the tiger, or innocent pets, or bystanders (innocent and not) weren’t shot at some point.  Too many Texans use guns as substitute brains or penises.

  6. 6.

    Keith P.

    “It’s not always easy to introduce tigers together especially as they’re older,” Almrud said, “but we’ll just play it by ear and see if he’s interested in meeting any of our other tigers.”

    Standard feline adoption protocol :)

  7. 7.

    laura

    Tiger, tiger, burning bright                        in the suburbs of the night.

  8. 8.

    Cermet

    Insane to try and raise tigers as pets; besides the fact these wild animals belong in their natural environment, sooner or later they will turn on its owner with tragic results. Then the tiger is put down through no fault of its own.

  12. 12.

    Josie

    @Anonymous At Work:

    Do you live in Texas?  If so, I’d be curious to know where.  If not, you should be careful about making general statements that have no basis in fact.  In all my seventy something years here, in three different locales, I have never been threatened by or even seen anyone walking around with a weapon.

  13. 13.

    Emerald

    Fantastic news! There’s a bill in Congress to make private/home ownership of big cats illegal. There are more tigers in captivity in America than are in the wild. Many of them are held in atrocious conditions. It’s gotta stop, but we’re going to have a surplus of needy not-wild tigers who will need homes as good as this one’s getting.

    Big job. Gotta do it.

  14. 14.

    Ohio Mom

    “Tigers are not allowed within Houston city limits under a city ordinance…”

    You wouldn’t think a city would need such an ordinance. Whoever put it in place was very prescient.

    I wonder what other animals are prohibited and whether my suburban town has a similar ordinance.

  16. 16.

    Josie

    @Ohio Mom: 
    I did some research at one point (I wanted chickens) and many cities in Texas have ordinances about not keeping wild animals or livestock in city limits. Mostly only domesticated animals are allowed. I found that I could keep a couple of hens but only if they were housed a certain distance away from human habitation. My yard at the time was not large enough. So disappointing.

  17. 17.

    Anne Laurie

    @Josie: To be fair, until it announced that the tiger was being swapped around between ‘exotic animal lovers’, my fear was that a random (possibly illusory) sighting would lead to some Second Amendment Defender accidentally shooting one or more innocent bystanders.

    If only some random large dogs, because all the ‘hunting accident’ stories make it clear that not every gun-holder can tell a deer from a cow from a woman wearing white mittens.  (Yes, there was a white-mitten fatality, in Maine, maybe ten years ago.)   One gun-humper at twilight, down the block from a golden retriever romping with a bunch of little kids…

  19. 19.

    Gravenstone

    @Anonymous At Work:  The first video circulating of the tiger (before the fugitive in possession of him rabbited with the big kitty) showed a guy with a handgun sort of staying in front of the tiger as it wandered the street. So yeah, the threat of being shot started almost immediately in this little saga.

  20. 20.

    Josie

    @Anne Laurie: Sure, I have read about such incidents.  My point was that Texas, in spite of people’s prejudiced ideas about us, is no more likely to have such incidents than any other states.

  24. 24.

    Baud

    where he will be introduced into a half-acre, naturally-wooded habitat, with a pool, trees, platform and a proper nutritious diet,”

    Damn tiger is going to be living better than I do.

  25. 25.

    Geminid

    @Anne Laurie: I remember when that poor woman with the white mittens was killed. I think she was standing on her porch or deck. Some hunter was quoted, “But everybody knows you shouldn’t wear white during deer season”!

  26. 26.

    satby

    Glad the tiger is safe and out of those people’s hands.
    OT: beautiful evening and I wanted to sit outside and just enjoy it, but mosquitos and gnats are already biting ?.

  27. 27.

    NorthLeft12

    I have enough trouble living with a seventy-five pound Chocolate Lab, can’t imagine anyone would want a freaking Tiger to share a living space with.

  30. 30.

    trollhattan

    Spouse was just showing me videos of a rottweiler and a panther scrapping like large kids, including the panther stalking and surprising the dog. They’d been together since the panther was small but now the rottweiler is the small one.

    “I’ll bet that’s in Russia.”

    “Doesn’t say, let me look. Yep, Russia.”

    Somehow it fit.

  32. 32.

    Warblewarble

    Tonight the tiger is safer than the children in Gaza . Let that sink in.

  33. 33.

    RepubAnon

    @Geminid:

    THE HUNTING SONG words and music by Tom Lehrer
    https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/the-hunting-song.pdf

    I always will remember, ‘Twas a year ago November, I went out to hunt some deer On a morning bright and clear. I went and shot the maximum the game laws would allow. Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.

    I was in no mood to trifle, I took down my trusty rifle And went out to stalk my prey. What a haul I made that day. I tied them to my fender, and I drove them home somehow, Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.

    The law was very firm, it Took away my permit, The worst punishment I ever endured. It turned out there was a reason, Cows were out of season, And one of the hunters wasn’t insured.

    People ask me how I do it, And I say, “There’s nothin’ to it, You just stand there lookin’ cute, And when something moves, you shoot!” And there’s ten stuffed heads in my trophy room right now, Two game wardens, Seven hunters, And a pure-bred Guernsey cow.

  34. 34.

    Dilbert dogberry

    Can’t help it!!!  This story reminds me about an old two escaped tigers in Texass.

    Seems they escaped from a zoo and were separated for a month or so.  They eventually got together.  One was sleek and fat and the other was skin and bones.  Sleek asked bones what he had been eating.  Bones said Texassicans.  Sleek asked how do you hunt them.  Bone said he hid in a tree and when one came by he would let out a loud roar and Jump on him.  Sleek said you are doing it all wrong.  First thing wrong is the loud roar scares the shit out of them and there is nothing left but the hat and belt buckle!!

  38. 38.

    Cacti

    For those who didn’t watch the Netflix documentary “Tiger King” that was all the rage last year, two of the most fascinating things I learned from it were:

    1. There are more tigers living in captivity as pets in the United States than there are living naturally in the wild.

    2. You can buy a tiger cub for about the same price as a pedigreed puppy.

    Both of those things seem incredibly wrong to me.

  40. 40.

    Geminid

    @Josie: I think it’s terrible the way people here profile Texans. They make you folks out to be a bunch of crazed rednecks, and it’s just not right!

    So, do you chew tobacco when you go rattlesnake hunting? Or take snuff. Asking for a friend.

  41. 41.

    zhena gogolia

    @Amir Khalid:

    Dakota Johnson’s grandmother? You mean Tippi Hedren, star of The Birds and Marnie?

    In my world, Dakota Johnson is Tippi Hedren’s granddaughter.

  42. 42.

    Another Scott

    It looks like a baby or a stuffed animal in this latest video. It looked huge in the first video (with the guy with the pickup truck) – it’s funny how our mind scales things depending on the context.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  43. 43.

    Anne Laurie

    @Another Scott: It looks like a baby or a stuffed animal in this latest video.

    He is a baby — or at least, in tiger terms, a young tween.  That’s why he’s still amenable to letting humans ‘play’ with him.

    Wait till the hormones kick in, and suddenly he’ll be a much less sociable beast (even with other tigers).

    That’s when the tragedies happen.  Unfortunately (she said), it’s usually the tiger who gets euthanized (or, at best, dumped) when the idiot who spent a couple thou on a really kewl pet discovers it’s not like owning even the biggest, most aggressive dog.

  44. 44.

    Minstrel Michael

    I have a vague memory from long ago of some Texas rancher looking to raise rhinoceri, so he could harvest their horns sustainably, for eventual sale to the same people who nowadays hire poachers to kill them. Did anything ever come of that scheme? My Google-fu isn’t sufficient.

  46. 46.

    Geminid

    @brantl: A landlord of mine took some birdshot in the face in a hunting accident, and it was never reported. Eddie was retired and kept cows as a hobby, so he got his vet to treat the wounds. And that was in Virginia.

  47. 47.

    J R in WV

    My brother loves to “hunt” and those quotes are important. He hunts big game on the big game ranches of Texass! Now, that isn’t always as bad as it might sound — the 700+ pound boar hog he shot with a handgun, that was requiring great aim, steady nerves, a good shot, else the hog eats you, unless the guide can take him down as he rushes you.

    He has a great big skull with tusks from that trip. He also has heads of Ibix, a rare antelope from Arabia, nearly extinct in the wilds of Saudi, etc, but now a prolific critter of Texass game farms. $1900 each, depending on the actual size of the antlers, the longer the higher the $$Cost.

    He bought 210 acres in the Hillcountry, put a little camp building on it, fenced it, captured a small herd of various deer besides the common White-Tail of North America. Then friends came out to shoot a browsing critter that was fed kibble from tower feeders.

    Didn’t really work out, game ranches are usually 20,000 acres at a minimum. With camp buildings that cost $2,500,000 and are beyond plush.

    Sold everything in the Hillcountry to move to a “Villages” development full of RWNJs just like Bro-guy. But there are shooting ranges there he can ride his bike to and shoot. Also bocce ball club he enjoys. No tigers that I know of, so far.

  48. 48.

    Kay

    In August, Reffitt drove to a BLM demonstration in Mississippi, hoping to surveil a particular activist. The family said that Reffitt intended to place a GPS tracking device on the man’s car. He abandoned the plan when he wasn’t sure he had the right vehicle.
    Nicole Reffitt said she was alarmed when she found multiple license plates in the bed of her husband’s pickup truck. She said her husband told her he used them to make sure he wasn’t being tracked. “I was like, ‘What the fuck? What are we doing?’” she said. “He told me to go to work and keep my business to myself.”

    So Nicole is bankrolling this patriot warrior lifestyle.

  49. 49.

    karen marie

    Cuevas’ wife knew where the tiger was at all times this week as authorities searched

     

    Why is she there giving the tiger a bottle instead of at the police station being booked?

  50. 50.

    Anonymous At Work

    @Josie: Houston, inside the loop.  That’s how I know Houston is only occasionally part of Texas.  Most people there are urbanites but it’s still Texas, so teh redneck faction had to be thinking, “How cool would a tiger skin rug look?” while accidentally shooting the neighbor’s dog through the fence.

  51. 51.

    Chris T.

    Tigers don’t need to “turn” on you, any more than any other cat. Just imagine one with the zoomies. A 500 pound guy taking a playful swipe at you with his paw, and …

  52. 52.

    Ken

    @J R in WV: But there are shooting ranges there he can ride his bike to and shoot. Also bocce ball club he enjoys.

    I’m seeing a new Olympic demonstration sport.

  53. 53.

    Ken

    So, any word on if the shelter wants to give the tiger up?  I imagine it would pull in a lot of prospective pet adopters.  (Also, I bet all the other animals are very quiet tonight…)

  54. 54.

    Origuy

    @Ken:  Since it’s a sanctuary founded by the late animal activist Cleveland Amory, I doubt they would release to anything other than another similar sanctuary.

  55. 55.

    Feathers

    @karen marie: My guess is that the one who safely surrenders the healthy and unharmed tiger gets the Get Out of Jail card. Also, if she can keep the tiger calm and happy, I’d let her feed the tiger and help get it to its new home.

  56. 56.

    TriassicSands

    @Cermet: …sooner or later they will turn on its owner with tragic predictable results.

    The tragedy occurs only if the tiger’s “victim” is someone innocent, which would not be the person keeping the tiger in captivity. Then, the real tragedy takes place when they kill the tiger.

    It’s getting more and more difficult to keep up with  human stupidity and cruelty.

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