It's Still a Wild World for Trained Big Cats
A Tiger May Appear Tame, but Experts Say Its Predatory Instincts Reign
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 27, 2003; Page A08
Although the house cat has been domesticated for hundreds of generations and several thousand years, try training one to fetch your slippers.
Cat owners know that their pets are not easily trained to perform tricks to win affection or even treats, and that tabbies do not usually place sociability above their own company. But no cat needs to be taught to flick out its paw to grab at an object flying by.
It is the same with the great cats -- tigers, lions, panthers -- but more so. You can raise a tiger cub in the company of humans, train it to interact with people and teach it to perform stage tricks. After years of systematic effort, it may seem that the tiger has been removed from the wild.
But that does not mean the wild has been removed from the tiger.
In the aftermath of the recent tiger attack on Roy Horn, an illusionist and performer of the Siegfried & Roy duo, many have wondered why a tiger that had been raised by humans from birth and trained so well would turn on its master and nearly kill him before hundreds of spectators.
It is almost certainly the wrong question. As experts have known for centuries, animals have deeply ingrained temperaments, personalities and instincts.
"The genes that contribute to normal behaviors in tigers have been tamed in your cat," said John Wright, a professor of psychology and a certified animal behaviorist at Mercer University in Macon, Ga. Despite intensive training of tigers, he said, "there is a genetic history that has been adaptive for them in the wild which suggests when there is a chance to establish a predator-prey relationship -- do so.
"You cannot overcome in one or two generations what the genes have learned over thousands of years," he said.
Tigers instinctively know how to be tigers. Nurture can teach animals how to adapt to situations, and learning is especially important for species such as humans that skillfully adapt to new environments. But no animal is a blank slate that can be turned into an altogether different creature.
Tigers' latent capacity for violence is perhaps what draws people to pay hundreds of dollars to watch them perform stage tricks -- but among Siegfried & Roy's many illusions, the greatest may have been the notion that these powerful predators were tame.
"They are not really social animals," said Joanne Oliva-Purdy, an applied animal behaviorist in Leadville, Colo. "They don't have the restraints of social animals not to harm those in the same group -- a tiger is a solitary animal, so anything in the environment could be open to attack."
Unlike dogs or humans, who need and depend on the company of others and frequently set aside their own interests for the benefit of the group, tigers answer only to themselves. Although some trainers boast of controlling these animals for long periods -- in circuses, magic shows and theme parks -- there is a long history of tigers' turning on human handlers and killing or maiming them.
It is partly for this reason that most tiger behavior experts and conservationists decry the use of wild animals as entertainment -- and suggest that it is dangerous for the people involved, demeaning to the animals and bad for conservation.
"I call this a public spectacle that is close to pornographic," said Michael Fox, a Washington veterinarian and ethologist -- a scientist who studies animal behavior, usually in the wild. "Putting these magnificent creatures on stools and making them do tricks -- it's simply a display of human domination. It's perverse."
On Oct 3 in Las Vegas, Horn had just come onstage with a white tiger named Montecore. Things quickly went wrong -- some reports suggest the tiger was distracted by something in the audience -- and Horn tried to intervene.
The tiger whirled on Horn, who tried to hold the animal at bay with his microphone. A moment later, Montecore had Horn by the neck and was dragging him offstage, where the tiger was subdued by handlers. Horn has received intensive medical attention and surgery.
It is not clear what caused the tiger to become agitated. Wright suggested a variety of hypotheses, ranging from "someone in the second row may have had a pheromone [chemicals believed to play a role in signaling between animals] that made the cat more aroused," to a movement on the stage or in the audience that stimulated the cat's predatory instincts.
Mel Sunquist, an associate professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at the University of Florida in Gainesville, said that Montecore's leap at Horn's neck was "hard-wired" tiger behavior.
Sunquist said he knows of many examples in which tigers have launched attacks almost instinctively, like the housecat that goes after the feather whipping by its face. For example, one trainer was walking beside an animal when he tripped and fell. The tiger was at the man's throat in a blur; the bite killed him instantly.
Sunquist said he once walked into a tiger facility with his daughter -- she was about 3 years old and unsteady on her feet. The tigers, all safely locked away, looked sound asleep when the toddler came by.
"Within a second, every tiger was on its feet and studying this small child," Sunquist said. "That motion told them, 'easy prey.' "
Robert Baudy, a tiger trainer and owner of Savage Kingdom, a breeding facility in central Florida, said people are drawn to the "extreme beauty of the big predators."
Baudy used to train tigers for shows and movies, and has had several close calls. On one occasion, he said in an interview, he was training a Siberian tiger to leap from one pedestal to another -- known as the "long jump."
It was a hot September day in Florida, and trainer and tiger were inside a large cage. A bodyguard stood outside, controlling the door in the event of an emergency. The tiger, named Chilly, made a few leaps but then stopped in its tracks. Baudy touched the animal with his whip. The next instant, the tiger leaped at him and knocked him to the ground.
"I was in a state of shock," Baudy said. "I could hear my bones being crushed and my flesh being torn. Thanks to God or my genes, I never lost consciousness. I screamed the tiger's name, and he turned me loose."
When Baudy looked to see why his bodyguard was not leaping into the cage to save him, he saw that the man had fled in fright.
Skin from Baudy's left arm was draped over his fingers, his right arm was broken and blood spurted from an artery. The trainer said he sensed the tiger was going to attack again, so he inched backward to the door. The moment he closed the latch, the tiger launched itself at him again, knocking the cage so violently that Baudy was hurled to the ground outside. Still bleeding, the trainer put his arm in a tourniquet and drove four miles for help.
Tales such as this, especially when such incidents occur in public, have prompted many animal rights advocates to demand an end to the practice of teaching wild animals to perform tricks.
"For the well-being of their handlers and for the emotional well-being of the spectators, especially children, this whole business should be outlawed," Fox said.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Hmm
Unlike dogs or humans, who need and depend on the company of others and frequently set aside their own interests for the benefit of the group, tigers answer only to themselves.
Long live the Dog!
