The white tiger named Montecore was born in captivity and raised by humans. The seven-year-old animal had been performing on stage since he was six months old. Yet neither his upbringing nor his apparent "tameness" could have altered what happened on Friday night, October 3, at The Mirage in Las Vegas.
Montecore, a 600-pound white tiger, acted on instinct, like a typical wild animal, and attacked his long-time handler, Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy, in a horrific incident that played out in front of a live audience. Horn, celebrating his 59th birthday that day, had just brought the leashed animal onstage and ordered the tiger to lie down. Montecore apparently refused and proceeded to wrap his powerful jaws around Horn's right arm.
The illusionist struck the animal in the head with a microphone, which apparently caused the tiger to lunge at Horn's neck. Montecore then carried Horn off the stage by the throat. Only after a quick-thinking carpenter hosed off the big cat with a fire extinguisher did the tiger let go. Horn, who had lost a lot of blood, was rushed to the hospital where he remained in critical condition on Thursday. He suffered a stroke after the attack, and has undergone two surgeries.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which inspects and regulates animal-entertainment acts, has launched an investigation of the attack.
"We feel terribly for Roy and fervently hope that he recovers from these grave injuries," says Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president for The HSUS, who met with Horn a few years ago during the opening of a Las Vegas humane society. "When the best-trained and most-experienced handlers of big cats can be attacked and dragged around like rag dolls, it is plainly obvious that untrained private citizens should not keep big cats as pets."
If only that were the case.
According to Richard Farinato, The HSUS's Director of Captive Wildlife Programs and the Wildlife Advocacy Division, the number of captive tigers living in the United States is roughly the equivalent of all the tigers living in the wild. Between 5,000 and 7,000 captive tigers are estimated to live in the U.S., where less than 10% of them are kept in professionally run zoos and sanctuaries. The rest live in woefully inadequate roadside menageries, circuses, traveling shows, big cat rescues, and backyards (where people keep them as pets).
In the past five years in the United States, nine people have been killed by privately held tigers. In Texas, home to perhaps half of the nation's backyard tigers, the big cats have been responsible for a series of attacks on youngsters over the past four years. A 10-year-old girl helping her stepfather groom the animal died after the tiger clamped her head in its jaws. A 4-year-old girl's arm was torn off, and a 3-year-old boy posing for a photograph inside the cage was fatally savaged by his grandfather's pet.
Anyone with access to the Internet can purchase these big cats. The animals can be bought, with pricetags ranging from $300 to $7,000, on the World Wide Web or from exotic animal auctions. The ease with which the tigers can be obtained belies the difficulties inherent in living with an animal who's genetically programmed to range more than 100 miles a day, swim rivers, and bring down prey twice their size. Nothing can prepare a regular citizen to deal with a tiger hard-wired to attack and kill.
"No big cat can be tamed or trained to be a safe, trustworthy actor or companion," notes The HSUS's Farinato. "No matter how long you've had the animal, or how well he's behaved in the past, every moment spent in direct contact with a lion or tiger brings with it the risk of injury or death for the human handler or owner.
"Tigers are hunters—predators armed with tools and instincts shaped by nature to be efficient and explosive killers," Farinato adds. "Birth in a cage, attended by loving humans, does not alter the animal's nature nor eliminate his capabilities; captive breeding does not wipe away the effect of millions of years of evolution and selection for success in the wild."
The first white tiger, like Montecore, came to the United States from India. The animal was shipped to the National Zoo in 1960. The tiger was bred, and her offspring distributed to other zoos. Siegfried and Roy later obtained their first white tigers from the Cincinnati Zoo. The white tiger is a chance mutation, a color phase of the species, and no more.
Now, however, they are billed as Royal White Tigers or Snow Tigers or other fanciful names. They have been transformed from essentially a freak of nature into an "endangered species." There are no endangered white tigers in the natural world clinging to a precarious existence. There are plenty in captivity, along with a few white lions, who have always been no more than a novelty or publicity draw for their owners.
The Big Picture
Tigers are just one part of the big-cats-as-pets problem, however. Perhaps as many as 15,000 private citizens keep lions, tigers, cougars and other big cats as pets. Many of the owners will encounter problems they never fathomed when they first bought their cuddly little cub. Some will discover, like the owner of the apartment-dwelling tiger in Harlem, that there's no suitable habitat in the big city for big cats. Others will learn, the hard way, that big cats don't play by society's rules, and the animals can attack without provocation.
And that's aside from the many cruelties suffered by the animals themselves, from poor diet to a lack of veterinary care to cramped living conditions.
It was for those reasons, and many more, that The HSUS's Pacelle and actress Tippi Hedren helped spearhead the effort to pass The Captive Wildlife Safety Act, which bans the intestate trade in big cats for the pet trade. The Senate and House bills were introduced last year by Sens. James Jeffords (I-VT) and John Ensign (R-NV) and Representatives Howard "Buck" McKeon (R-CA) and George Miller (D-CA) respectively. President Bush signed the act into law in December 2003.
While the law wouldn't have prevented the attack on Roy Horn—whose eight-shows-a-week act at The Mirage has been permanently closed—it will help many others who don't have the training and the experience of the famed illusionist. After all, if it can happen to Roy Horn, it can happen to anyone.
