For those who met Titan while he was staying with us, or watched his videos on this blog, here is a picture of him in his new home. He is doing great and has remained the sweetest and happiest tiger imaginable. He has a nice enclosure and a great pond, but nothing beats a nice swim in the pool on a warm summer day:
It is difficult to believe that ten years have passed since we raised the “Litter of the Law.”
We put together video and photos of a few highlights of their lives so far, and thought some of you might enjoy seeing it. It is simultaneously too long and too short, as it is difficult to capture ten years of the lives of eleven puppies without making a very, very long movie…
"We want more Americans to know about the millions of shelter pets that need good homes."
These new stamps are beautiful and encourage adoption. But I will not purchase them.
I believe these stamps will have a genuinely harmful impact on animals. Let me explain:
Twenty years ago I would have enthusiastically supported stamps encouraging adoption. Since then, HSUS, PETA, ASPCA, and others have been waging a very effective propaganda campaign to manufacture the illusion that adoption and breeding are contrary. They have been so persuasive in creating the societal notion that rescue is moral and responsibly purchasing a well-bred pet is immoral, that I am no longer comfortable going along with propaganda that reinforces this misconception. While I continue to advocate for adoption/rescue in some situations, I also advocate for responsible owners doing research and supporting good breeders in many situations. (Note: good is not synonymous with purebred) It is a simple truth that if you make it impossible for good breeders to survive, all that is left are the “bad” breeders. I believe these stamps will contribute to the already overwhelming anti-breeder sentiment in this country, and that directly hurts animals.
There is a reality in which people breed animals because they are too lazy to avoid it, to make a buck, or to show their kids the miracle of birth. A reality in which people acquire dogs and casually dump them when they become inconvenient, or neglect them in their yard, or abandon them. Rescue is a vital component of this reality.
Just as real, however, is the world in which serious breeders devote incredible amounts of energy, knowledge, and money to improving their chosen breed. They screen homes carefully, take back animals, fund research, and are deeply dedicated. Their animals are generally sold to owners who are similarly responsible and committed. Within this group are most people within the fancy, most serious competitors in animal activities, even the people who think their pets are surrogate children. These are people for whom animals matter profoundly and whose lives revolve to a large degree around animals. Not only do the people in this reality not generally contribute to the shelter population, they actively adopt or rehabilitate pets and work to educate the casual public. Their work protects not only the animals of the future, but the owners as well. When we persuade people that the place to get a pet is from a responsible breeder, then we can make real inroads into eliminating irresponsible breeders, and by extension most animals in rescue, because there will be no demand for their puppies.
If every home in America WANTS to “rescue” a puppy from the shelter, we have destroyed the market for well-bred dogs and created demand for precisely that which we ostensibly want to eradicate. We need to eliminate the bad breeders, not the good ones, and making shelters the only politically correct place to acquire a dog does just the opposite.
The problem is that the “Don’t Breed or Buy While Shelter Animals Die” propaganda ignores this dichotomy entirely. Not only ignores it, but seeks to destroy all breeders by painting them with the same destructive brush. And they have been VERY effective. Most non-animal people are absolutely certain that there is a huge pet overpopulation problem caused by the fact that breeders are greedy and evil, and that the solution is to boycott breeders, pass mandatory spay/neuter and and number limit laws, only adopt pets, and send money to HSUS. This message is already being shouted so loudly that the vital reality of responsible breeding is being lost in the noise.
Additionally, pro-adoption campaigns tend to be so zealous in their desire to get pets adopted that they forget the even more important objective of keeping pets in their homes. By sugar-coating rescues as wonderful, appreciative pets, they can persuade more people to adopt pets, but many of those pets will be back in the system in a few years. While there are many wonderful animals in shelters, there are also many unhealthy, poorly bred, unsocialized animals with behavioral or training issues that may take years to resolve. We should be educating people and helping them to look at ALL their options to find the pet that is best suited to their lives and will be likeliest to thrive and remain with the family. This includes looking at rescues and purebreds, and most importantly it included explaining the downsides of any pet to a potential home.
I am all for reminding people to consider rescue when looking for their next pet. I am merely opposed to attacking every other option in pursuit of driving people to rescue. We also need to increase awareness of the remarkable people who are doing a truly great job preserving and nurturing healthy happy dogs and who are being destroyed by the same propaganda machine that is producing these stamps.
On February 24, 2010 in SeaWorld’s Shamu Stadium in Orlando, Florida, animal trainer Dawn Brancheau was pulled under the water by an orca. A few minutes later, Dawn was dead. Subsequent discussion in the media and around the Net has focused on the keeping of orcas and the dangers of working with powerful predators.
Profoundly missing in this discussion is Dawn’s voice.
I cannot speak for Dawn, but I can share with you the professional animal trainers’ perspective. You see, we all understand a common truth, and when an event like this occurs, we talk late into the night trying to figure out how we can effectively share that truth with others – how we can explain why, as Roy Horn was slipping from consciousness in the jaws of Mantecore the tiger during a Las Vegas show, he was saying over and over, “Please don’t hurt the cat… .”
Animal training is not a job, not a hobby, not an interest. It is an all-consuming passion. Those of us who devote our lives to working with animals love what we do beyond reason. We work 365 days a year, and when we are not working with animals, we are playing with them. We forego vacations, families, nice clothes, tidy homes, and most social activities to spend our lives with animals. We spend countless hours talking about how to care for animals, we get up every few hours to bottle-feed baby creatures, we spend all our money on animal care, and we use most of the rooms in our homes for something animal related. We are joyously consumed by our chosen path, and when an animal causes one of us injury or death we are sad, but hold no ill-will towards the animal. Let me explain.
We work with animals – not Disney characters, or humans wearing fur costumes – but real animals with real teeth and claws and immense power who behave according to their animal natures. We know that our chosen vocation is extremely safe based on the number of people harmed, but we also recognize that it entails real risk. We believe that life is an adventure we cannot authentically live solely by avoiding those things that might result in failure, injury, or death. Some people climb mountains, race cars, surf, pilot airplanes, luge, or share their lives with animals, and each of these journeys poses risks, although in truth people are far likelier to die in traffic accidents or childbirth than in any of these more dramatic undertakings. Sitting at home on a couch may indeed be a safer choice, but living a rich and full life and owning our own choices and their consequences are worth a little risk.
When accidents occur, people often want to examine the details and motivations of an animal’s behavior to understand exactly what happened and why. Careful investigation and analysis is a valuable process to allow us to improve our techniques and avoid needless future accidents, but in truth we can rarely know precisely why an animal behaved in a certain way. In a very real sense, however, such speculative detail does not matter: whether the animals were attacking, trying to protect themselves, sexually aroused, responding in annoyance to excessive pressure or fear, or some other miscue, the stark truth is that any of these circumstances could have arisen with similar outcomes. Many animals are vastly more powerful than humans: given sufficient time, wherever humans and animals interact, injuries may occur.
People who argue against working with animals often assert that certain animals are “unpredictable,” a completely erroneous claim. Each species, and each individual animal, is endowed with a well-established range of behaviors and rarely acts in conflict to these. Understanding and correctly predicting animal behavior is among the most basic challenges and responsibilities of any trainer.
Animals are often held accountable for their actions, a profoundly wrong conclusion: animals are not subject to “blame”: they always and simply act as animals, and people are responsible for minimizing situations in which harm might come to anyone.
Underlying the common reaction to traumatic animal incidents lurks a contemporary human expectation that the world should be “risk-free.” As human enterprise has relentlessly expanded, we have paved, denuded, and sanitized huge portions of the planet. In virtually every populated environment, we have effectively eliminated any predator that might pursue us. We fully expect handrails and padding and signs to protect us at all times. But nature cannot and should not be completely tamed. When we venture into the wilderness, or bring a piece of the wilderness into our world, we find that bears, wasps, mountains, skunks, waves, tigers, and orcas do not respect our notion of sovereignty and will behave as they have behaved since time immemorial. Innate animal behavior is not amenable to human moralizing: it is neither good nor bad. It is simply a truth that we must understand if we wish to interact with the natural world. Each day, millions of animals safely coexist with man. Many visit schools, perform tricks, and lounge around. For hundreds of shows, Roy’s tigers reliably came on stage and performed perfectly. Such numberless days of productive and enriching interaction cannot be forgotten as we scrutinize the day someone is injured.
Why is it that when people die in automobile accidents we do not seek to ban cars? Or when people die on mountains we do not seek to outlaw mountain climbing; but whenever someone is injured by an animal there is such an outcry? There are four reasons:
1. Animal attacks are rare, which makes them dramatic and newsworthy.
2. Few people actually work with animals or experience them firsthand: and it is much easier to blame, condemn, and legislate out of existence something you do not understand and that does not directly affect you.
3. Over millions of years of evolution, hominids developed a powerful innate fear of being eaten.
4. Human society is plagued by uninformed zealots always ready to twist any event to serve their purpose:
The loudest voices heard in the wake of traumatic animal incidents are those of Animal Rights advocates who aspire to outlaw all animal ownership and who seize any tragedy as an opportunity to chant their mindless rhetoric: “these animals ‘belong’ in the wild. This death proves it…” No. By now every thoughtful reader should realize this is simply hogwash. Nearly every species of animal can be superbly maintained in captivity where they are enabled to live rich lives that are longer and more comfortable than in the wild. We can learn from such creatures and enjoy them and share them with millions of people – especially young people – who will grow to care about the natural world. These animals are not demeaned or mistreated and are not yearning for freedom. They have plenty of space, excellent nutrition and fabulous lives. The only people who believe these animals have bad lives are people who have little experience with them and are forming their opinions based on uninformed sentimentality–people with genuine expertise quickly learn that these animals have excellent lives. The accidental death of a person who devoted herself to the well-being of captive orcas does not prove that orcas cannot be kept humanely, and the propagandists at PETA should be profoundly ashamed for using trainer Dawn Brancheau’s death to preach their own agenda, an agenda rejected and reviled by every thoughtful animal trainer.
As a professional working every day with powerful predators, I do not fear for my life; rather, I fear that should I be injured or killed by an animal, people who espouse “rights” but care nothing for actual animals will use such an event to harm the very animals I have spent my life cherishing.
We love these animals completely, even when their nature does not accommodate human society, and even when their actions harm us. They share their worlds with us, and in doing so bring immeasurable joy to our lives. We are afraid, not of them, but for them. We want them to be preserved in the wild and in captivity by skilled and dedicated experts, and we want people to stop being enraged when they behave like animals.
All the lives of all the animal trainers ever lost working with animals is a number far smaller than the number of children who starved to death while you were reading this article. Working with animals is safe and immeasurably beneficial for the humans and animals. If you really want to help someone, focus on providing food and healthcare to the millions of people who absolutely will perish without your help, and leave those of us who love animals to make our own well-informed decisions about how to balance our safety with our passions.
I am heading outside now to play with my beloved animal friends. I may make a mistake, and I may die. If so, please do not mourn the manner of my death. Do not blame the animal. Do not imagine that I was an idiot, or naively unaware of what could happen, or thought myself invincible or protected by the animals’ love. It is the life and death I chose, and lived without regret. A lifetime full of joy, passion, and wonder shared with many magnificent animals whose lives were also full of joy. Whenever and however I die, I have been blessed to live my dream.
Parasite prevention is a very circumstantial endeavor. What works perfectly in one situation may fail completely in another, so it is impossible to offer universal advice. Furthermore, we have been fortunate enough, or perhaps wise enough, that we have always lived in a part of the world where these parasites are a mild nuisance, not a plague, so our advice may not be valuable for people who live in southern states or other parasite-friendly climates. Each person needs to reach their own conclusions concerning insecticides, and I am in no way judging anyone else who has come to a different conclusion!
That said, every spring we stock up on our chosen weapons to do battle against these little buggers, and I thought it might be beneficial to some of our readers to share what we have found most effective in case you have not thought of some of these tools.
There is one misconception that I find troubling: many people seem to believe that topical pesticides are essentially unavoidable given the fact that not using them allows for the transmission of lethal diseases and therefore obviously insecticides are a better choice than death, even if they cause some degradation of overall health. These people (and institutions) simply douse every pet with Frontline, Advantage, Revolution, or a similar product every month because they are afraid that otherwise their animal might get a flea or a tick. In my opinion this is misguided, although it certainly makes the companies selling the products quite happy! The truth is: depending on where you live, there is a chance that your dog might contract from fleas or ticks a disease that might be serious or lethal and using insecticides reduces but does not eliminate the risk of these diseases.
No question, fleas and ticks are undesirable and can carry disease, so I am not suggesting that anyone simply live with them. I am suggesting that in many parts of the country, topical insecticides can be used far less often or eliminated altogether by using some less harmful tools as a first line of defense. Constantly applying toxins to avoid fleas or ticks is a last resort to be utilized only when less harmful alternatives have failed.
You must balance two unknowns: how much damage will be caused to your animal by administering toxins versus how likely it is that your dog will contract a disease and how damaging that disease will be. You need to research your region, and your dogs’ lifestyle and make the best possible decision, and you need to refine that decision over time to make sure it remains the healthiest all around solution for your pets.
Here are the main tools we use to keep parasites at bay:
Swimming is great for less traditional pets too!
If the above are not adequate, there are of course many environmental and topical insecticides that you can use as needed…
Last week, arguing that orcas should not be kept in captivity, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk lamented that captive orcas are “swimming in their own diluted urine.” A perfect metaphor for the insanity of Animal Rights: apparently she believes that wild orcas all use a giant toilet where they flush their urine away…
“Don’t be silly,” some may say, “in the ocean there is lots of room for the urine to dissipate whereas an aquarium is much smaller.” This is emblematic of the sort of “facts-be-damned” thinking PETA endorses. Simple truth: the water in any U.S. orca habitat is orders of magnitude cleaner than the water in the ocean. It is filtered, UV sterilized, chemically balanced, and checked several times a day.
If you believe orca’s should not have to swim in dirty water containing dilute urine, by all means get them the heck out of the filthy ocean and into a clean aquarium…
In the same interview, Bob Barker explained that the enclosures orcas are kept in are equivalent to putting a human in a bathtub. Really? When is the last time you were able to swim at full speed in your bathtub? Dive many times your height below the water and then leap into the air more than twice your height? Maybe in Bob Barker’s bathtub… Simple truth: orcas are kept in habitats costing tens of millions of dollars, their diets are superlative; and their exercise and enrichment plans among the best in the world. Cetologists and trainers at Sea World have been instrumental in protecting these animals in the wild and in captivity, and have provided more knowledge and funding to help orcas than almost anyone else in the world while also fostering interest and passion for these animals in tens of millions of children. Bravo!
Mr. Barker also spoke about how “demeaning” it is for an animal to have to perform tricks for the entertainment of humans. This is absurd. An animal learns a behavior and it does that behavior and receives praise and reward. This exercises their bodies and their minds, and is in no way demeaning to the animal. Animals make no value judgments about whether doing a flip befits their social standing—they simply do the behavior and have a great time. It is a game, one that they play in the wild as well, and one they can stop anytime they want. Perhaps Mr. Barker is simply projecting his life onto the animals—he DID spend his life performing in front of the masses in exchange for a great deal of money which he now seems determined to spend ruining the lives of as many animals as possible.
HSUS is now lobbying to have Tilikum the orca released to the wild. They want to repeat the Keiko adventure which generated many donations. You remember Keiko, the orca who was taken at great expense from his nice Oregon enclosure where he was healthy and happy and turned loose into the wild where he pined away for months following boats and swimming into bays looking for any friend who would feed him fish and rub his belly as he remembered from his days in captivity. Until he finally died with pneumonia, starving and lonely. Yes, let’s do that again! Because animals deserve to be in the wild…
You have probably read the “Rainbow Bridge,” or one of its several variations. Each of these is a lovely story about where your pets go after death—a beautiful place, full of all the things they love and absent any possible source of discomfort, where someday we will rejoin all of our past friends and romp in beautiful meadows where all animals love and help one another.
I do not want to be a curmudgeon, or diminish anyone’s delight in a parable; however, for me, such saccharine tales insult and trivialize reality—as though the wonder we share with our animals while they are alive is somehow not enough and we need to make up a better story; as though we need to turn our animals into vapid and immortal Disney characters in order to love them rather than simply loving them as they are.
Whatever happens to them when they die, I cannot know or alter, so I focus on what I can control—ensuring that their time in my reality is the best it can be.
One of the greatest lessons our pets can teach us is to live in the moment. It is amazing how little my dogs seem to worry about the mortgage, or taxes, or growing old, or death.
Want your dog to have a perfect day at the beach? Take him. Want him to bask in front of the fireplace with a perfect toy to chew on? Make it happen. Take him to the snow, go on a hike, teach him a new trick, rub his belly. You get at most a few thousand days with your dog, so make them great. Your dog has simple wants, and it is amazing how many of them you can make come true with just a little effort, so make his life wonderful. Give him beautiful meadows in life, not in death.
I imagine some of my readers will protest, “the Rainbow Bridge makes me feel better, there is no harm…” and that is fine, you are obviously welcome to believe in whatever fairytales you find comforting, and I know many people have found solace in imagining their animals at the Rainbow Bridge. I for one am going to delight in the real living animals that I find magical enough. And when they are gone, I will grieve, but ultimately I will remember the lifetime we shared, and that will be more than enough to fill me with joy.
We have been caring for a young Bengal tiger named Titan. He was 8 weeks old and 15 pounds when he arrived, and around 22 pounds eight days later. He has around 500 pounds still to gain. He is on his way to a new and exciting life, and is here for some additional socialization. We are quite fortunate to have some wonderful colleagues who sometimes send animals here which allows us to keep learning and experiencing new individuals, and benefits the animals by exposing them to new experiences with trainers who are good at showing them that the world is a wonderful place. While with us, Titan will get to meet a wide variety of “other” animals and have different experiences. One aspect of training animals for film is that a wide variety of animals either live here or have visited, so all of our animals are quite welcoming towards visiting creatures. Last summer we had a baby camel in the kitchen and I opened the door to let the dogs say hello, and they walked right past her as though a camel in the kitchen was utterly expected…
I thought it might be interesting to share a few observations and images of his stay. Of course, this post will be mostly video since I am pretty sure most people would rather watch a tiger than read my observations!
Anytime you are raising an animal that will grow up to be easily capable of killing a human, the question of bite inhibition and boundaries becomes critical. If you raise a dog or cat that mouths too hard, jumps up, or is a little headstrong, it is not the end of the world. A lion, tiger, or grizzly that has those traits is very different. Not only is it dangerous, but it ends up having a much less rich life than it could have because it cannot be safely handled. At the same time, the process is slightly complicated because they are not domestic and are far less eager to please or willing to concede leadership. This makes for an interesting balance: you want to avoid conflict but at the same time you need situations to 
reinforce that you are the leader. I find that some people are far too permissive, and the animal learns that they can do whatever they want, and other people are far too proscriptive and the animal is essentially being told “no” all the time. I really try to set situations up where there are many obvious paths to success, so there are few rules, but then be absolutely clear about those rules. I also start right away by teaching a fun and positive game that is easy and gets a reward—usually put your feet on a mark. I make this a super fun game, so anytime the animal wants to do something I do not want I can tell him to go to the mark and suddenly he has a clear path to success.
Titan is an absolute gentleman about his bottle. He is good about keeping his feet on the ground, and if he does put a paw on you he is very gentle and keeps his claws retracted. At this point he is consuming both milk in a bottle and meat in a bowl. If anyone is curious, the milk is a combination of goats’ milk, Esbilac, vitamins, amino acids, probiotics, etc. And the meat is primarily turkey for now, along with some liver and other organ meats.
It is winter so we did not get to play in the pond, which is too bad since tigers are one of the few cats that enjoy water, and I would really like to play with him in the water… We did play in the bathtub a few times. (Of course the raccoon likes to bob for mussels and carrots in that bathtub, and was not sure a tiger was the best partner for that activity!) We did get a little time outdoors when the weather was reasonably nice:
At first blush, Titan was NOT impressed with the idea of a canine buddy. He had surprisingly strong prey drive for his age (even for a tiger!), so I decided to start by introducing him to a calm but large dog whom he could not possibly perceive as a snack. First I played with Titan for a good while so he was not too rambunctious, then I fed him a meal so he was not too hungry or cranky, and then I brought Ansel into the room while Titan was in his crate, and let them sniff for a little while before I opened the crate door. Titan came out, looked at Ansel, and hissed loudly. He then lay on his back, but let out a loud staccato roar. Ansel was impressed and left the room… I will not bore you with all the details, but I worked on this for the next couple of days, and now Titan loves all the dogs, including Ansel, and spends several hours a day wrestling and playing with them:
Because it was drizzly outdoors, we spent most of our time indoors, playing, training, eating, napping, working on agility, generally suffering the misery of captivity. We took Titan as one of the demo animals for a seminar on craniosacral osteopathy which is a great opportunity for socializing, and he played with lots of people and animals:
Titan is on his way now to a new home. He is a wonderful tiger, and we will miss him greatly.
Today was one of those days when you try to stay inside. We mulled cider, finished decorating for Christmas, and played fetch in the living room. When we had to go outside to do chores we bundled up with mittens and hats. This is the first truly cold week of the season at our facility, and it has me thinking, again, about how technology benefits animals.
The most obvious benefit is simple heat—whether a propane heater, a wood stove, a baseboard heater, radiant flooring, or even just a roaring fire, how grateful we all are to be inside and warm. We take the dogs out for exercise several times a day, and they absolutely enjoy it, but after an hour they are back at the front door imploring us to let them get back to their comforters and heaters!
Closely related to warmth is dryness. Each of our animals has somewhere dry at all times, usually up to their knees in soft dry bedding—woodchips to straw, hog fuel to mattresses, pillows to down comforters. Even the luckiest wild animals are lying on frozen ground that melts and soaks their fur, leaving them with little protection against the cold ground that sucks the energy out of them.
Water is perhaps the hardest thing to ensure during the winter. Trough heaters and constantly running hoses, and we still end up carrying buckets of hot water several times each winter to keep warm water available. In the wild, outside of the fast moving rivers, there is just no water. The deer are licking a few drops of moisture off rocks, hoping to get enough to stay alive till the next thaw. This is particularly hard for ruminants whose stomachs do not do well with cold water.
Keeping them from slipping is also a challenge. On icy days we bring everyone inside—in the house or in stalls on rubber mats with bedding. Every spring, the first time we hike up our creek, we find the bodies of wild animals that tried to get to water and slipped and fell down the steep embankment and lay pitiably for hours with shattered limbs before being eaten or dying.
I write this article cuddled in my warm bed with dogs and cats while sipping cocoa. Looking over at Sequel, hogging the down comforter as always, I smile. Long ago, on a cold night like tonight, his ancestor took the first tentative steps out of the lonely dark to join my ancestor by the fire, and we are both immeasurably thankful. Our animals are all asleep; warm, with blankets and water and full stomachs. But I look out the window towards the woods and think about the many wild animals suffering. Some of them will find their way into our home, our pastures, or our vehicles, and some will have the reserves to endure the long bitter winter, but many will simply die—unable to find enough food or water and eventually succumbing to the brutal cold.
I wonder if our animals dream of going to live in the wild, or if the wild animals dream of coming to live with us….
