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Tigers Are Complex Wild Creatures, Not "Killing Machines"
 Tigers
Are Complex Wild Creatures, Not "Killing Machines"
by Angela Grimes, Director of Operations, and
Dr. Craig Brestrup, Director of Development
San Antonio media outlets have played over
and over the plight of the zookeeper and tiger involved in
an incident on July 14 where a zoo worker was attacked by
one of his feline charges after failing to close a series
of gates in the tiger's enclosure. In response to an Express-News
article in which a zoo executive called the tiger a "killing
machine," Dr. Craig Brestrup, Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation
(WRR) Director of Development, issued the following statement
and letter to the editor.
Tigers are "killing machines,"
according to the San Antonio Zoo's Executive Director as he
commented on the recent encounter between the zoo keeper and
the zoo inmate.
Zoos have spent the better part of the
past 2–3 decades trying to convince the public that,
despite present appearances and historical realities, they
really are education and conservation centers and not mere
recreational venues. So what does this action movie type dramatization
of what the Director himself later admitted was normal tiger
behavior have to teach us? Apparently that tigers, and presumably
other predators, are mindless automatons bent on senselessly
taking the lives of any poor creature who happens in their
path. Fundamentally different and lower on any measure that
matters than humans, whose own prodigious killing surely has
higher purposes and purer motives.
Tigers are predators and predators are
designed by nature to take other animal life in order to survive.
They are not machines and killing is not all that they do.
But the image of their dumb ferocity has been popularized
for a very long time to draw gullible visitors to zoo exhibits
and circus exhibitions, and so it continues to be.
— Craig Brestrup, Ph.D.
 WRR
has long advocated that wild animals belong in the wild, not
in zoos, in our homes, or otherwise on display for public
entertainment. The masses who throng to U.S. theme parks,
zoos, and aquariums each year, staring at the magnificent
"wild" creatures, are rarely attuned to the deprivation
and suffering of these animals, who are often kept in small
exhibits better adapted to please the public eye than meet
the needs of the captive wild animal.
The wildlife living at WRR are there because
there is nowhere else for them to go. Sanctuaries exist out
of this necessity, which is a very different thing than choosing
to breed and incarcerate wild animals for lives that are terribly
diminished from natural ones. We are pleased to provide our
sanctuary animals with the best captive life possible, but
are also always saddened that it is not the natural life in
which they could have flourished. |
