Lions and Tigers and Bears? – All Dead

        Zanesville, Ohio, the site of the strangest safari in Ohio's history. Terry Thompson released 56 wild animals from his private zoo onto a small unsuspecting town in Ohio, and then took his own life. The lo- cal police department was forced to shoot and kill 50 of them. How did this ever come to happen? Some people feel like they are important enough to have a private zoo. Local policies allow for people to be smug- gling tigers. Local police are not pre- pared for an invasion of tigers. There are many reasons, but who's really to blame for this incident.

      Owning large dangerous exotic animals such as tigers and bears is not only embarrassingly lavish but irresponsible and dangerous. People who buy these animals are typically housing them in cruel conditions, since they don't have the facilities to have a fabricated habitat. Usually they are under-trained hobbyists and the animals will grow beyond their control.

      The law regarding the exotic animal trade is rather lax, since there are fairly easily obtained exotic animal licenses for entertainers. You might say we need some system in place to make sure people aren't stockpiling their own private menageries. Perhaps some sort of purchase history, maybe limit him to only 1 tiger every two weeks?

      Of course it is much more likely people acquire these animals in illegitimate ways, and how can you pass a law against something that is already being done illegally? How can you prevent people from manically releasing an army of tigers upon an unsuspecting town as a last grand statement before taking their own life? Ideally, all the animals that were being kept in that private zoo in Zanesville would have been transferred peacefully into zoos in the surrounding areas, and they could be kept happy and healthy. Unfortunately, that was far from the case.

     The police who shot and killed the 50 animals are receiving a lot of criticism from animal rights activists, who disagree with the police's methods in stopping the marauding army of large predatory beasts. It seems to me that the victims in this incident are the animals. Not because of the obvious reasons of being shot, but because they were forced to live a life in petty captivity before they were killed. That being said, the police were doing their job, and you cant expect that a small town police force would be properly equipped to humanely capture such large dangerous animals on short notice, when most police have trouble capturing humans humanely on a daily basis. It may sound callous but there is a part of me that prefers the loss of 50 tigers to the loss of even one human life. Perhaps I get that from some innate caveman bloodlust for tigers, or   maybe I just like people more, who knows?