Why Animals Aren’t Better Than People
By Marni Soupcoff

After Las Vegas performer Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy was attacked on-stage last week by one of his performing tigers, a Royal White named Montecore, explanations for the mauling abounded.

 

Casino owner Steve Wynn claims that a big-haired woman in the front row of the audience distracted the tiger. Animal rights activists at PETA are blaming the brightly lit stage and loud music.  Meanwhile, Roy’s partner Siegfried is calling the whole ordeal an accident, saying Roy slipped onstage and Montecore, sensing something was wrong, tried to protect himself and his master by picking Roy up by the neck like a cub and carrying him off the stage.

 

Why stagehands then had to spray Montecore with fire extinguishers to get him to release Roy, who remains in the hospital partially paralyzed and critically ill, Siegfried does not say.

 

More likely, it is the animal experts and behaviorists who are right. They claim that Montecore was not helping Horn, but attacking to kill, lunging at the performer’s neck and essentially “going for the jugular” in the most literal sense of the phrase. Montecore was using his teeth to get his “prey” in a choke-hold and might have gone on to suffocate Horn had he been able to hold on to him longer.

 

In other words, Montecore was acting like a tiger.

 

Although this statement seems obvious, I think it bears repeating. The tiger was acting like a tiger. He was playing out his role as a wild animal with predatory instincts.

 

This inherently violent and, well, animal side of wild animals is often overlooked or glossed over by activists who point to animals as more tolerant, peaceful, and harmonious than humans. The suggestion is that animals are superior to man because they live in harmony with their environment.

 

A typical representative of this view is Timothy Treadwell, a controversial advocate for the endangered brown bear, who said of his favored creatures, “These bears are so much better than people…They do no damage…They are basically peaceful.”

 

Last week, Treadwell and a female companion were attacked, killed, and eaten by a brown bear in an Alaska park. Park rangers had repeatedly warned Treadwell to keep his distance from the bears, but he had not heeded the advice, claiming he was more likely to be killed by an angry sport hunter than a bear and genuinely believing, no doubt, his own adage about bears being better than people.

 

The truth is that animals are not better than people. They are animals. Which means that, in the case of natural predators, they are genetically programmed to kill. Humans, by contrast, may maintain some animal instincts, but have evolved to the point at which they can use reason and conviction to overcome these instincts and make conscious choices about their behavior. When they wage war, humans do so knowingly in pursuit of long-term goals or aspirations, be they humanitarian or egomaniacal. They may choose to be pacifist vegans or meat-eating hunters, but whatever you may think of their decisions, you can know that humans have done what they do because they chose to and that they have moderated their actions based on their individual consciences and moral codes. This cannot, quite obviously, be said of wild animals.

 

It is tragic that Timothy Treadwell and Roy Horn had to pay such a terrible price for their misjudgment or, at the least, underestimation of the strength of a wild animal’s predatory instincts, and I hope that Horn recovers as quickly and fully from his mauling as is possible. It is clear that he truly loves his tigers (Horn is said to have muttered after Montecore’s attack and before being rushed to hospital, “Don’t harm the cat”). 

 

But the two attacks serve as a useful reminder that, as much as many activists wish to idealize them as saintly role models for us selfish humans, wild animals remain, at heart, just that: wild. And we do everyone, animal and human alike, a disservice when we forget this.

 

Marni Soupcoff’s column appears on Mondays at TAEmag.com.

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