The actual story referred to in the title of Lieut.-Colonel Frank Sheffield’s How I Killed the Tiger (1902) amounts to only 36-pages (including numerous, highly evocative, illustrations), but even the second edition is not easy to find and will cost you something in the neighborhood of $100.
But we happily live in the age of marvels, in which even such esoteric treasures are already scanned in and sitting there available in electronic form at the touch of a fingertip.
Col. Sheffield’s yarn is quite a story.
I would not myself want to take on a fully grown Bengal Tiger with an unreliable percussion fowling piece, even if I had a couple of General John Jacob’s explosive bullets in my pocket. But, if I had been so foolhardy as to do so and wound up once knocked down and mauled by a tiger, I’d like to hope that –like Col. Shefield–, faced with another charge, I’d still have “some kick in me” and stand there, Bowie knife in hand, “determined to make a hard fight for it.”
Cougar Mountain Zoo, Issaquah, Washington, October, 2011, Taj, a 370-lb. Bengal Tiger responds to toddler pressing her hands on the glass of his cage with obvious feline gestures of affection.
At zoos, one sometimes sees a side of large, dangerous animals which is essentially identical to the behavior of your pet at home. One day, at the Chicago Zoo, I watched with amazement as a White Rhino the size of a delivery van manifested recognizable ecstacy while a teenage zookeeper stroked her back with a large push broom.
David M. Villalobos, a 25-year-old realtor from Mahopac, New York, yesterday jumped 17′ from a Bronx Zoo monorail into the Siberian tiger pen. After his rescue, Villalobos informed police that he “wanted to be one with the tiger.”
Mr. Villalobos describes himself on Facebook as “a Messenger of the Return of the Divine Mother.” He listed under his Religious Views: “Mother Earth.” Villalobos goes on to tell his readers: “Fear is irrelevant, there is no greater bliss than living in My Divine Light and in the Womb of My Unconditional Love.”
It seems clear that the combination of the exploitation by the entertainment industry of charismatic predators in nature films and the sentimental emotionalism of the modern cult of Nature worship with some regularity impact impressionable people so strongly as to produce a mental disorder we might refer to as Theraphilia, “the passionate love of, and self identification with, large, dangerous animals.”
The victim of Theraphilia becomes obsessed with some large predator, and gets so carried away with admiration and affection that he comes to believe that one of the most dangerous killers in the wild is going to love him back. He insists on getting himself into the immediate proximity of his favored critter, talking to it, and trying to touch and pet it, and he eventually winds up, as the famous Timothy Treadwell did, as the main course for lunch.
It’s not likely that any individual seriously afflicted with this pattern of delusion is going to be cured. The victims derive too much emotional gratification, and place too much personal dependency, on their fantasy. The real root of the problem is cultural. It is extremely profitable to purvey misleading, sentimentalist natural images and story lines, both commercially and in the course of fund raising for environmentalism and preservation. Consequently, contemporary culture will inevitably continue to be awash with feel-good images and stories peddling anthropomorphic notions of animal behavior, all laying the foundation for uncritical self-identification and emotional involvement with animals by neurotics.