Stacey Konwiser, a tiger keeper working in the tiger pen at a zoo in Palm Beach Florida, was doing last minute prep work for an upcoming “Tiger Talk" last month. Though extremely experienced and widely praised as a “tiger whisperer,” Konwiser inexplicably entered the tiger pen while knowing the tiger had access to it, and one of the tigers attacked. Though the zoo staff immediately tranquilized the rogue animal, the keepers had to wait for twenty minutes while the darts took effect before they were finally able to pull Konwiser out of the pen and rush her to the hospital. Sadly, Konwiser later that day from a bite wound. (for clarity, the picture alongside is not of the attack on Konwiser but of a stuntman with a trained tiger)
By all reports, Konwiser was a lovely person who truly loved her work and her tigers, and I have nothing but respect for her. She did all in her power to raise these majestic creatures, lovingly care for them and preserve this endangered species, and I respect her dedication to her career and the spirit of her goals.
That being said, has it ever occurred to anybody that perhaps big cats should be endangered? Yeah, I said it. Maybe we should be celebrating the rarity of these animals that can shred humans quicker than a sugar crazed cadre of nine-year-olds can demolish a piñata.
Last year’s death of Cecil the Lion enraged millions of Americans who were furious that American hunter Walter Palmer would dare slay a poor, innocent, overgrown kitty cat. Palmer’s tour guides were charged of breaking poaching laws by luring Cecil out of the cat sanctuary, but the tour guides deny the charges and say Palmer was completely ignorant of the law and bore no responsibility for the alleged crime. Zimbabwe refused to press charges against Palmer and says he’s welcome back in the country, yet the animal rights activists never let the facts get in the way of a good target for their rage and consequently scoured him in the media and threatened his life.
Here’s the thing. I get that it’s sad to see the cute little fuzzy wuzzy animals that remind you of your dearly departed kitty cat Cuddles get slabbed, but we both know perfectly well that all you people bemoaning the tragic loss of Cecil would be screaming, “Kill it with fire!” if you saw Cecil prowling in your neck of the woods.
In case everyone forgot, big cats kill people! Sometimes they are hungry, sometimes they are territorial and maybe sometimes they just feel like having some fun. Remember that time Cuddles clawed you when you got all up in his grill? Those same basic spiteful instincts are in the big cats as well. The only difference between Cuddles and Cecil is that people die when Cecil gets in a bad mood.
Many big cat species are considered endangered, but has anybody stopped to consider that maybe there is a good reason they are endangered? People have a tendency of killing off animals that kill humans. Is that a bad thing?
I understand there are ecosystems to maintain and that many people feel inspired by the beauty and grace of these fantastic creature. I myself am a cat lover, and there is a big part of me that would love nothing more than to spend the day playing with lions, and tigers and…well, less so the bears, but still, I get it. I too would find it a tragedy if these animals were to go extinct, so I can sympathize with a desire to save them, but shouldn’t we take a second to consider that by saving these predatory animals we are quite literally killing people? Hundreds of humans are killed every year just by lions alone, and though that’s certainly not going to drive humanity to extinction, I doubt this fact is of much comfort to the families of those who become glorified kitty chow, and let’s recall that these hundreds of human deaths are being caused by animals that are endangered and relatively rare. What happens if we succeed in increasing their population?
It’s not the programs to save the big cats that bug me but the animal rights people who blindly support these efforts unthinkingly. It’s usually the people who live in the most urban environments far away from any animal that could be considered a threat who are the most insistent that we must save these predators and allow them to run free, but these animal rights advocates never have to deal with the consequences. These free range big cats almost universally make their homes in the backwater parts of poor countries where the locals have almost no voice with which to complain about the man-eaters. From their climate controlled houses in the suburbs, these keyboard warriors demand that dangerous animals be preserved by being dumped in the back yard of the most vulnerable peoples in the world, and all this is done so the animal rights activists can feel good about themselves as they watch the animals in documentaries from the safety of their homes where sensible people in generations past have eliminated all the dangerous animals from the local habitat. These animal rights activists’ tunes would change if they knew the lions were roaming free just ten miles from their children’s playground. Rest assured, every free lion is hunting in someone’s playground.
If communities across the world decide they want to undertake the risk of having a giant predator in their neighborhood, more power to them. I’m not trying to tell India, Zimbabwe or Uganda what they need to do with their own animals, and again, I mean no disrespect for Stacey Konwiser who chose to risk her life to work with big cats, but I am telling Americans who champion these causes that more big cats will inevitably equal more human deaths, and if you wouldn’t want these things living in the plains near your home, it’s highly hypocritical to insist they must live in the plains of Africa.
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