Kyuubi Land

"god forbid people need 24/7 access to therapy to-"

THAT'S NOT THERAPY

THAT IS A PROGRAM DESIGNED TO TELL YOU WHAT IT THINKS YOU WANT TO HEAR

IT CANNOT PROVIDE YOU WITH THERAPY

DESIGNED TO TELL YOU WHAT IT

THINKS YOU WANT TO HEAR

This is not the post I wanted to make for International Tiger Day, but it’s apparently the post I feel compelled to make. A big name photographer decided to make a joke in a post today about maybe needing to use an intern to bait a tiger into approaching for a photo and I just… I’m still upset over an hour after reading it.

It seems kinda silly, right? Like those are really common jokes, right? Especially after Tiger King and shit.

But guys, I’ve seen up close what happens when a facility has a fatality involving big cats. I know people at multiple facilities who have lost colleagues (and in some cases, they were interns). It is horrific and traumatic and people carry it with them for the rest of their lives. The folk I know went on to become staunch advocates for better safety practices - which is an incredible, important thing, and which also means they make a choice to relive that trauma endlessly in front of their peers in an attempt to prevent anything similar from happening to someone else.

It really bothers me that our general online/media culture has decided that zookeeper fatalities are okay to joke about. It’s not. It’s disrespectful to the person who died and it is incredibly unkind to their colleagues and peers and friends. These days, I’m very quick to push back on jokes like that - just a quick, hey, we don’t do that here, that’s not cool - and I guess I’m asking y’all to join me in that.

Trump wants to “bring Columbus Day back from the ashes”: a day honoring a barbaric man who enslaved hundreds of people.

Watching / interacting with / messing with people is absolutely enriching for many zoo animals. People make loud noises and do weird things when you pounce close to them! I can’t add videos to a post with one video clip already, but I’ve got two that come to mind when thinking about cats actively interacting at windows.

The first was with Sophia, the elderly jaguar at Happy Hollow Zoo who unfortunately recently just passed. A couple of years ago I was hanging out there with a friend and he’s a huge cat person too, so we just camped out at her window for a while. She was alternating being up on a perch watching and patrolling and didn’t pay us much attention. But then this family with little kids came over, and they had the kids turn their back to the windows for a photo. She immediately ran up, bounced up behind the kids and pawed and mock-bit at the air. They screamed, everyone reacted, and then she just… decided that was enough and trotted back up to her perch to watch from afar. I could literally see her making the choice to go over, seeing something more interesting than two quietly adoring adults had showed up.

Second was last fall, with the lioness Ashoka at Zoo Boise. I was there for the Halloween event and obviously it was a busy day. I’d snagged some photos of her and the male earlier in the day before the hordes had arrived and, again, she didn’t care very much about me and my camera. So mid-afternoon I found myself back at the window again, with a gaggle of kiddos alongside me and her a good ten feet away, and I looked down to check my phone. BAM there’s lion paws in front of my face. And shame on me for depriving her, I didn’t do anything interesting like scream or jump or flinch. She gave up after a couple seconds and went down to paw at the kiddos… and was really interested in their treat buckets. My guess is maybe they looked like stuff she’d get enrichment in sometimes? But as little kiddos will do, after they got over the screaming, they took turns pulling little trinkets out of the baskets to show her, or tilting the buckets so she could see inside. And she was really into it!