A comedian jokes, rightly I’m sure, that it’s far too easy to buy a tiger. Buying a tiger “is not an all day thing,” he says, “it’s like an hour—I’ll be right back with our tiger.” We do hear about people who welcome big cats into their homes and we all have a pretty good idea of how such stories are likely to end. While we would be surprised to hear of a man being killed by his pet hamster or pet budgie, we are not at all surprised to hear of a man being mauled by his pet tiger. Why are we not surprised? Precisely because it’s a tiger!
There are a couple of problems with welcoming a tiger as a pet. The first is that people welcome them into their homes when they are just little cubs. They are tiny, helpless, dependent, adorable. Who hasn’t at one time or another had their heart-strings tugged by the pitiful mewing and playful pouncing of a baby tiger? The second is that tigers are undomesticated. They have not, over the course of many successive generations, been bred away from ferocity and toward docility. Though they may share ancestry
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