Then the police officers RUSHED FORWARD towards the tiger. At that moment, the animal lunged . Maybe if they had kept a safe distance, the tiger would not have reacted instinctly to protect itself. I wonder why the police nor the zoo staff were equipped with tranquilizer or stun guns.

It seems keeping wild animals in zoos is an acceptable practice, but if they act wild or protective or fail to conform to our human standards of behavior, it’s permissable to just kill them, endangered or not. And the argument that zoos are necessary for the “educational” or “enlightening” opportunity to view animals that could not be seen otherwise may be weakening. Hey, I may never see Mt. Kilamanjaro in person, but that doesn’t mean you blast off the top and put it in a museum, but if someone could accomplish that and make $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ doing so, I wouldn’t be surprised. However, animal capture and exploitation is much more easier and profitable and will contine until people stop visiting zoos.

I am anxious to know where the discussion goes. Like so many other forms of domination that humans take for granted, clearly zoos and circuses are hot buttons—as we justify the subjugation away by (in the case of zoos) saying it’s an act of ecology. And the circus: I’ve actually never heard anyone offer a compelling explanation/justification/reason/excuse.

Dustin Rhodes

I thought your concluding paragraph was particularly profound; humans don’t ever want to consider or confront what we really do to animals: the ones we eat, the ones we lock behind bars in zoos far away from their natural habitats; the animals we dress up and make march around in costumes to entertain our children (so that they learn right away that animals possess no inherent value or worth); the animals we lasso and shock and drag to the ground in rodeos; the animals we tie up and ignore in our backyards; the animals we shoot and kill for sport and pleasure. Literally, I could go on and on.

As misanthropic as it might sound to say it, when I hear about events like the one in San Francisco–a wild animal has killed another human–it makes me very sad; sad because of all the conditions that humans have put in place–for millenia–to guarantee such an event. What’s stopping us from understanding the inevitability? Humans should have a good frame of reference: the more we remove ourselves from Nature, from community, from loving relationships, the more, we, too, become insane; the more likely we are to “strike out” against our fellow humans. We need not look too far or too closely to see the parallels. They are obvious and yet invisible, it seems.

When will animals–for ALL OF US–become beings that elicit our deep respect, our utmost compassion, our willingness to allow them free lives lived according to their own terms?