My Pain Is My Strength.

L I Q U I D S 

Mikhail Zaretsky is (or was, I can’t find a more recent english language source) the tiger trainer for the Nikulin Circus (source). He currently posts videos on youtube about taking his tigers to boarding schools for kids to pet and climb on (source), and how his tigers and lions live together happily (source). Over on instagram, he likes to post videos of himself handling leashed tigers (source) and sometimes riding them (source). (He also tags all of his instagram posts with #bengaltiger, but that’s confusing rather than problematic.)

I’ve been over this before: There is no way to safely, healthily keep an adult tiger full contact in a human residence. You either declaw, defang, or drug the tiger (which he’s been accused of doing), or the human is going to end up dead.

And if he is planning a reserve, he should know better than to transport tigers in an SUV. Or to keep them on leash. Or to let them interact with schoolkids. Or to let them paw at his face. Or to cohabilitate different species. Or to overfeed his tigers–when I first saw this video, I thought they were from the fur trade, that’s how fat they are.

So yeah, keeping big cats in close contact with humans is still a really bad idea.