Speaking of tigers...

Last fall I went to North Carolina for my good friend's wedding and one our activities was a trip to the Carnivore Preservation Trust. North Carolina is one of the states that still allows citizens to keep wild animals as pets. When these brilliant people realize that it's dangerous to keep animals whose teeth are shaped like scissors and their claws are razor sharp and they're given up or taken away, CPT is where they live the rest of their days. They all really should be living in the wild but because they've been raised by humans, they can't.

A carnivore, by the way, is defined by its teeth, not the intestines as is often the argument that humans are carnivores. A carnivore's teeth work exactly like scissors, not to chew anything but to cut meat into bite sized pieces that are then swallowed whole. CPT's residents range from Siberian tigers to some amazing small cats that jump 12-15 feet with these powerful back legs and can catch 2-3 birds at the same time (one in each paw and one in the mouth), and a jaguar that can carry the carcass of an animal three times its weight up into a tree, with its teeth.

For the record, there are several differences between this facility and a zoo:
1) It's a not-for-profit organization that rescues abused, abandoned or otherwise neglected carnivores. It does NOT purchase animals, contribute to breeding programs (although ironically that is the origin of the CPT) or capture animals from the wild for profit, as zoos do.

2) They have very limited visiting hours as their focus is the well being of the animals, not making money.

3) You MUST go on a tour with a CPT guide. You cannot walk around unsupervised or even stray from the group. In addition, the guides only take you to visit the cats who are feeling "social" that day and avoid those that are new and still adjusting to their new environment. The guides are extremely well versed in their subject and highly engaging so you leave feeling educated and enlightened. They are so reverent to the animals and instruct guests on how to be considerate so that you feel you are being granted permission by the animals to be viewed, instead of the zoo environment of entitlement.

4) The habitats are dirt, grass, rocks, trees and bushes. There is no concrete. The concrete viewing arenas at the zoo are so disgusting to me. Can you imagine living your whole life with nothing natural in your environment? It reminds me of the white man making the Native-American children wear shoes when they had always felt the earth beneath their feet or fish in an aquarium the size of a shoe box filled with plastic plants. So sad!


We learned some really interesting things about tigers. The volunteers never ever go inside a cage with a tiger. A tiger is an extremely powerful and dangerous animal. Its cage is at least 20 feet high and food is catapulted over the top or put into an empty cage before the tiger is allowed to move into it. If someone hits a deer on the road there, they bring it to CPT to be thrown over the cage for the tigers, a real treat!

We also learned that white tigers are actually albinos. They are freaks of nature, not a rare species of tiger as some zoos (the famed educational centers) and circuses would have you believe. The first white tiger was found in the jungle by an Indian Maharajah in the 1800's. He brought the white tiger cub back to his compound and bred it with another tiger until they had another white one. As the story goes, he killed all the yellow cubs as he really didn't have any use for them. Then he inbred the white ones to get more but only one out of every four comes out white and they are almost always born with some kind of deformity - cleft palates, crossed eyes, malformed spines, shortened tendons of the legs and other totally disgusting things. In the wild, a mother tiger would probably kill a white cub, or it wouldn't survive on its own because it doesn't camouflage with its environment.



Then they told us a story about a guy who bought a "guard tiger" for his store. It was just a cub but it kept people from robbing him, apparently. Then one day it got taken away because he couldn't prove that he'd bought the tiger in the U.S. See, and here's where the law is totally stupid, it's legal to buy a tiger born in the U.S. bred by the circus or whoever, but not to buy one from the wild. I guess the reasoning is that an animal born in captivity is already ruined and might as well be a pet, but those animals should NEVER be bred in the first place. But I digress. A couple of years later, the shop owner turned up to the authorities with his papers proving the tiger's origins and demanded him back. The good people at CPT walked this guy to the cage of his now 600-lb. tiger at which point the guy freaked and said "you can keep him!" Good to know the people buying these cubs know so much about tigers, eh?