This is kind of a horrible story but I want to talk about it anyway. Over the last 24 hours police in Ohio have had to track down and kill nearly 50 exotic animals apparently released by their owner before he killed himself.
In the rural Zanesville area of Ohio there was an exotic animal, I guess you’d call it a park, that had 18 of the endangered Bengal tigers, 12 lions and eight black and grizzly bears along with wolves and many types of monkeys.
They have all been killed in an effort to protect the public from these mature predators. The owner Terry Thompson was found dead from an apparently self inflicted wound. The reason that so many of these animals were able to be in a habitat so foreign to them is that Ohio has some of the weakest laws about exotic pets in the nation.
While we should always be concerned when someone takes their life, I am going to say that the real tragedy is that so many of the tigers were killed. It was always a tragedy that a private citizen was keeping such animals, but when his actions lead to the destruction of them that is just insult to injury.
There are only between 3,000 and 5,000 of these tigers left in the wild. There so as many a 2,000 more in captivity but that is a perilously small gene pool for the perpetuation of a species like the Bengal tiger.
Given that they are often used for traditional Chinese medicine they are very susceptible to poaching in the wild. Some of those 2,000 in captivity are raised on ‘tiger farms’ where they are then harvested for their body parts.
With the loss of these 18 today the species comes closer to extinction.
I am really not a radical on this issue. I am not going to say that I think that places like the National Zoo where they work to study and preserve species should not have tigers, especially ones that have been born in captivity and would not be able to return to the wild.
However, for some random guy to own them is somehow just wrong to me. These are creatures that are solitary hunter with huge ranges in the wild. To keep them on a farm in Ohio is never going to be anything close to what they evolved to live like.
The same goes for the other exotic ‘pets’ Mr. Thompson had on his farm. He had just recently been released from prison over a charges of mistreating the animals he owned. It is impossible to know what was going through the mind of someone who has killed themselves, but it seems possible to me that this had something to do with his actions on Tuesday.
We live in a world that has a remarkable web of life. We may be the dominate species on the planet because of our ability to speak and our wondrous hands that allow us to develop and use tool, but we are just one animal among many.
It is time to start thinking about what it means for use to own animals. I have had dogs as pets my whole life, but a dog is not a tiger or a lion or a wolf or a bear. A dog has been domesticated for 10,000 or more years. They have become so tied to humanity that they are genuinely happier when they have a human partner.
That is a an approperate pet. To consider lions or tigers in this same category is a huge mistake. Just last year in Colorado (another state with criminally lose pet laws) the owner of several tigers was killed by one of her pets.
A couple of years ago a pet chimpanzee beat a woman to death who was visiting the house where it lived. All these incidents have one thing in common; they are the result of trying to keep a wild animal as a pet.
Wild animals are just that, wild, and they should be kept in the wild whenever possible. Today we have a tragedy all the way around, human, animal, and moral. The only way to avoid this kind of thing in the future is for our national laws to supersede those of the states and say that wild animals can not be kept as pets.
If you want to have a zoo, great, get licensed and meet the standards. But just owning such creatures is not a casual choice, nor should it be allowed casually.
The floor is yours.