Grr.

An e-mail acquaintance of mine is at Harvard this year, on a Nieman Fellowship (Ivy League school, not as much food, I’d wager), studying the evolving moral code of how we deal with animals. Fate handed her a big fat case study with the mauling of Roy (of Siegfried and, etc.) by his own white tiger.

You know, I’m a person who’s kept a horse, who has a dog, who eats meat and doesn’t get bent ouf of shape over hunting, and yet…I hate circuses. I mean, I hate them. A lot. Zoos? No problem. But making a tiger jump through a hoop, or a bear dance on its hind legs? I always root for the animal to take a swipe at the trainer. I just hate seeing this. It seems entirely unnatural. A horse is a domestic animal, and running and jumping is part of its nature, so asking it to jump a fence seems like part of its job. But a tiger is a wild animal, and asking it to leap around a series of stools while some sequined putz cracks a whip strikes me as, oh, real unnecessary.

Not that what happened to Roy is a blow for animal rights. Nothing good is going to happen to that tiger. I only hope that in my lifetime, we’ll come to a more humane place in our dealings with animals. Especially wild ones.

Posted at 9:27 pm in Uncategorized |
 

One response to “Grr.”

  1. ashley said on October 7, 2003 at 12:51 am

    Not as much food? Homey don’t think so. I believe I saw a “60 minutes” feature on their dining plan:

    http://www.dining.harvard.edu/frameset_res.html

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