Your daily reminder that you are not a predator pic.twitter.com/oYmMyzTpOo
— Nick Squires (@meatymcsorley) June 14, 2018
In related news, Not The Onion… but the BBC — “Does the US have a pet tiger problem?”:
Taj was a four-month-old tiger cub when purchased at a Texas truck stop by the driver of an 18-wheeler lorry. But after Taj began tearing up the truck’s cab, the driver contacted Austin Zoo to get the animal off his hands. The zoo now looks after the fully grown 17-year-old Bengal tiger male.
Taj is one of as many as 7,000 tigers living in the US either in zoos or privately owned, according to some estimates. That’s nearly double the estimated 3,890 tigers still prowling in the wild around the world.
Many of America’s tigers could be in people’s backyards as pets, and often aren’t registered, especially in states like Texas. No-one really knows just how many tigers there are out there.
At the heart of this surprising tiger turnout is the very American notion of a God-given right to do one’s own thing, including owning a pet – no matter how exotic – being an individual liberty that the state should not mess with…
It is easier to own a tiger than a dog that has been labelled dangerous in the state of Texas, which could have between 2,000 and 5,000 tigers.
“Texas is a conservative state and values personal liberties and the right to keep what you want,” says Pamela Boich of the Texas Human Legislation Network, an animal welfare lobbying group…
Floods and hurricanes notwithstanding, Texas’s climate is usually very amenable for tigers, meaning they can live outside year round, without the need for winter quarters, says John Gramieri, general curator at Austin Zoo…
And here we thought the imported boa constrictors in Florida were an ecological disaster!
Considerably further down the ‘dangerous wildlife’ scale…
Obviously https://t.co/wPk6hw7ioF
— Alessandra T Codinha (@ATCodinha) June 13, 2018
The Washington Post quotes an academic expert:
… Suzanne MacDonald, a York University psychologist who studies urban raccoons… wasn’t worried. Why? Because raccoons — as their black masks might suggest — have “quite a few superpowers,” she explained not long after the drama ended Wednesday morning. The most obvious of those talents: a crack climbing ability.
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Out of Our LeaguePost + Comments (122)