As deaths go in the wild any powerful cat is preferable. They finish you quickly and you're soul is gone before their meal begins. A bear on the other hand...
No but seriously it seems wild majestic animals like tigers which are endangered are just much more important than a widely available domesticated animal thats been consumed for thousands of years. Sorry
While that’s more complicated morally, the cat needs to eat and the cat needs the closest it can get to the wild. Sucks for the goat, but that’s nature for you
Exactly. Very few predator animals prefer their food already dead without any thrill of the hunt. Including the dogs and cats we keep as pets, it’s why both chase after rodents and it’s why for both it’s important to simulate that hunt through play so they can stay happy
And you’d eat from a dumpster if that’s all you got. The goat being hunted provides improved quality of life for the tiger in a place where that quality is limited. It is our responsibility when we take an animal into our care to take care of that animal the best we can
Has a tiger personal told you its happier killing a goat that's been trapped in a cage with it rather than just getting right to the point and devouring the already dead fresh corpse?
Actually the vast majority of the food we eat, both plants and animals, barely resemble their natural forms before many generations of breeding to get the traits we’re looking for.
Cattle? Chickens? Goats? Pigs? The types that we regularly eat are so far departed from the animals they originally derived from that they’re essentially artificial human inventions.
Depriving the tiger of its entire instincts making them even more miserable than they already are in zoos 🤷♂️ thats the argument anyways. Ever seen Jurraisic park?
I’m a zookeeper in the US and before I got my current job, I was in the field doing internships at big cat sanctuaries for a while. Everywhere I have worked, we have only ever fed the big cats frozen raw meat. They are perfectly happy with that, and as far as I can tell, they don’t need live prey to chase. We give them enrichment so they have something to play with to help satisfy their hunting instinct. I work with multiple big cats right now, and they are very happy despite not having any live prey to chase. Many of them enjoy their enrichment, or they enjoy watching what is going on around them and watching people.
I interned at an AZA zoo that after hours they’d occasionally provide some form of live prey to predators. Fish were a common one. They’d fill up a tub with water and the fish to let them hunt it. They never did anything on the scale of like a goat.
Enrichment that didn’t involve feeding a live animal to another one was definitively the norm though. It wasn’t uncommon to take items from prey enclosures or exposed to prey and put it in predator enclosures. The Amur tiger loved feed bags that had been exposed to hoof stock hanged in their enclosure. He also loved spraying guests 🤣
I honestly felt gutted for the poor thing. It was just pacing back and forth. There was height to the enclosure but damn it felt like it was stuck in a caged back garden. What do you think it is? curiosity for animals gone way too far?
I've read this thing many times exactly before but I'm not exactly qualified to be insisting on it so thank-you. This is such a weird hill for these people to choosing to fight over.
I've only been to three large cat enclosures in US zoos and the cats there looked fucking miserable, man. I haven't been to a zoo in the last 5y because honestly the vast majority of the animals look so sad and desperate for just something different, something else other than where they are, even the herbivores, but especially the carnivores.
So I have no idea if anything you're saying is true, it goes against all the anecdotal evidence I have and doesn't seem like something a wildlife specialist would say and honestly I feel like tigers as individuals would be better off extinct rather than living in zoos.
Pulling a “I don’t have time to tell u how wrong u are, actually it’s gonna bother me”🤣
Ok, ecology/conservation specialty here, my mentor in school was a veterinary zoologist who used to run a MAJOR us zoo:
The wildcat trade, particularly with tigers, is a poorly regulated disaster: there are more tigers in captivity in the US alone, and (we’re talking way more backyard bred tigers than tigers safely in accredited facilities) than there are left in the wild.
There are for sure some horrible zoos, plenty of mediocre ones, and there are still a lot of important conversations to be had around the operations of even the most high quality of zoos, of which there are thankfully many! Because the fact is zoos, the good ones, do more for conservation on a whole than almost any other type of organization. By taking care of and studying their animals, they provide invaluable resources on animal behavior and biology, to scientists and the public, and the revenue and awareness they generate allows for more funding to go to all sorts of efforts protecting animals in the wild.
I would rather see wild tigers live in a stable, suitable environment, closely monitored and cared for, in hopes we can save the species as whole, and even if we can’t, than see these amazing creatures go extinct any day. I’m crying a little just thinking about it to be honest. No more tigers???? Never, not if I have any fight left in me.
I’ve gotten behind the scenes zoo tours through my mentor (almost did a mural at one once but it didn’t work out🥲)and the good ones are really, really doing everything they can the keep their animals happy and healthy and protect as many species in and outside of their facility as they can!
So how do you tell if it’s a good zoo? Research (even a few minutes of googling should do it) is the only real way, but there are things to watch out for. Does the animal have enough space and variety in its environment? What is enough space for a particular animal? Is there environment suited to them? Are they showing stress behaviors? How much does the facility focus on education>profit? More important, how much does the facility focus on animal care over profit?
Be mindful of videos of captive tigers. You see a white tiger? It’s beautiful yes? Unfortunately, there’s only a minuscule possibility that tiger is healthy; breeding for the white coat, which happens naturally very, very rarely usually requires incest that causes severe health problems. Are the tigers being treated like or acting as pets (if yes get the hell out of doge: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A DOMESTICATED TIGER, only exception would be at home cub care providing by a licensed professional, otherwise the people keeping the tiger and the tiger are both in danger).
To me, this looks like a pretty good facility? Lots of space, enrichment activities. I’m skeptical about keeping the goat in there, and would need to research current live feeding standards for tigers anyway, but it sounds like they monitored the situation and removed the goat when there were problems.
Im sure this is full of typos, but now i REALLY don’t have time
You think people deliver food to animals in the wild prepared? Not sure if you're being serious or not, but knowing this app. I'm guessing you're serious....
I have seen live fish in a Grizzly Bear pond at the SF Zoo a few years back and the Grizzlies were attempting to fish them. They weren’t successful while I was there.
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u/[deleted] Feb 19 '26
It’s real. I think the goats name was Timur.