In my Read This and That series, I pair unlikely reading suggestions by recommending an old-fashioned but special book (e.g., A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca) and some other source of the written word that does not qualify for any literary prize but should (e.g., ridiculous online reviews). This is my way of encouraging all reading, all the time.
However, in this post, I pair my favorite book The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, written by John Vaillant, with the modern day miracle known as Netflix’s Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness. I simply request that you put the subtitles on when watching the show because that still counts as reading and the premise of Read This and That is thereby preserved.
Stealth 
Vigilant
Most of what people currently know about tigers is the product of Netflix’s trash masterpiece Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (“Tiger King: MMM”). There aren’t many of them in the world, and most of them are jailed in unworthy cages owned by strange people obsessed with becoming rich and famous. Tiger King: MMM doesn’t get deep into any real specifics, but the series reminds us that tigers are fast, strong, beautiful, and scary, and people will violate laws and common sense to carry their cubs, bribe them with comfort and care for their friendship, and adopt their persona and style because tigers are better than us. There is no debate that tigers are better than you and me. But tigers are not and will never be better than the mighty and ignoble Tiger King, himself. Let me explain.
I knew lots of tiger facts long before I binged Tiger King: MMM twice. In fact, I’ve known lots of tiger facts for a long time, many specific, like the unreal-sounding thousand pounds per square inch measure of an average tiger’s bite force and that their stripes run all the way through their skin like weird hair-covered moles. A tiger’s forepaws have five claws and they can act as any of several weapons at the tips of their literal fingers, including heavy clubs and slashing knives. Its hind paws have four claws, which it uses to stand on and attack at full height or jump impressive distances up into the air or leeeeeeeeeap an unnaturally excessive width, like all the e’s I’ve typed to make the point of being too long to also be correct. Even a tiger’s tongue can cause severe harm; it is so jagged, a few licks can remove hair and the first few layers of skin. Tigers regularly attack and eat black and brown bears that greatly outsize them, “tearing the bear limb from limb and scattering its appendages across the battleground.” They climb trees to swat at helicopters. “This is what you get when you pair the agility and appetites of a cat with the mass of an industrial refrigerator.”
Before I met the Tiger King, a vengeful Amur tiger who snapped and became a serial killer (of humans) because he couldn’t take any more abuse became my best friend. This tiger hunted his first victim, a man who tried to poach him and failed. My best friend hunted that man in the remote corners of the Russian Farthest East until he found the poor hunter’s cabin. The tiger broke in and destroyed everything that man owned, including metal pots and pans. Then, the tiger patrolled the perimeter of the cabin, resting long enough to melt the snow in patches and take two shits nearby, waiting for the man to come home so he could kill him. And then he did, leaving only a few of the man’s bones behind. That tiger even followed the man’s scent to a nearby public outhouse, where he broke open the lock and ate every trace of the man’s shit inside.
I met my best friend only a few years ago when I first read my favorite book, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (“The Tiger: ATSoVaS”), written by John Vaillant, but I had dreamed of him since I first saw a tiger at a zoo or circus as a child. Tigers have always been my favorite attraction because, even in my little girl mind, they were unstoppable. I never considered the caged tiger’s cost because I took for granted that he had to pay any. I thought that some tigers agreed to be handfed, and only until they decided to also eat the hand that fed them. I thought that the only harm in seeing a tiger was the risk that he breaks loose from his exhibit and eats some fat kid licking an ice cream cone. To me, that was a risk worth taking. I would go out of my way to visit these cats, read about them, watch videos of them, and otherwise witness how powerful, cunning, and graceful they are, living at a constant baseline of ready to bite heads off and escalating to actually doing it. My indoor cats aren’t much of a substitute for these big wonderous cats, so I just keep them as fat as possible.
Despite my love for them, I had never read a detailed, historically driven explanation for the current state of tigers in our world until The Tiger: ATSoVaS. “While tigers were being stolen from the forests, the forests were also being stolen from the tigers,” explains most of it, but there are the intricate complications of politics and poverty in those forests too. I even learned about special tiger-specific government agencies. In Russia, there was a sort of Tiger Crimes FBI comprised of experts in both tiger psychology and the remote, intemperate corners of that country. The squad leader of the Russian Inspection Tiger unit and his men were responsible for protecting my best friend from the dead man’s illegal poaching attempts, but they failed. As a direct consequence of their failure, the tiger took things into his own forepaws and the Russian Inspection Tiger unit then became responsible for stopping my unhinged, brilliant best friend before he killed again.
I learned lots of hard facts as this fascinating story unfolded in The Tiger: ATSoVaS, but also some of the loose, soft ones that make Tiger King: MMM equally eye-opening. Tigers are big business and even bigger obsessions. Both on the Tiger screen and in the Tiger pages, I confirmed the many ways tigers are better than us, but also that this superiority is why they will always, always lose against us.
I am not spoiling the end of the superbly written book to report to you that I sobbed uncontrollably over a cold plate of stir fry while I read that my best friend was not only killed, but he’d lived a horrifying life of constant, violent attacks and unmitigated injuries that drove him fully to vindictive tiger madness:
In addition to the deep flesh wound in its left forepaw, it now appeared that the tiger had been shot twice in the right leg at point-blank range with weak loads of buckshot. One cluster had only gone skin deep into the foreleg while the other had penetrated the joint above, and many of the balls were still in place . . . [I]t had been shot an extraordinary number of times[,] . . . this tiger absorbed bullets the way Moby-Dick absorbed harpoons . . . The end of the tiger’s tail was also missing, and had been for a while—either shot off or frozen. There were no plans for a formal autopsy, but it was clear already that during its short life . . . , this tiger had been shot with literally dozens of bullets, balls, and birdshot . . . “Maybe after someone fired that birdshot into him, he got angry with the whole world.”
I cried so violently as I walked home from the restaurant that people stopped me to ask if I needed help and if was afraid to be going home. I didn’t need help, the tiger did. He could never be safe in his home or in ours. The tiger could not be his fullest, most tiger self because that made him a target. He also had no choice to be anything else, so he suffered for it. Every day of his life.
Tiger King: MMM teaches us the same sad lesson, but by focusing more closely on us than the tigers. I loved every minute of the show and I made a new best friend, the Tiger King. I am not a traitor to animal rights by loving the Tiger King. I do not love the Vengeful Tiger less or respect him less or mourn his life and his death less because I have also found love for the Tiger King. My love for tigers and my wish for a world where they can exist freely is deeper and better grounded because of the Tiger King.
Yes, Tiger King: MMM proves that tigers are and always will be more popular and more desirable than beautiful, half-naked, young women open to polyamory. We, the audience, are uniformly more outraged by the Tiger King’s alleged multi-tiger euthanasia than we are by a long list of legitimately deplorable things he is equally likely to have done, including:
- His alleged warehouse-scale arson,
- The alleged conspiracy to murder his likewise murderous archenemy,
- His devious asset-hiding to become judgment proof,
- His blatant, serious drug abuse,
- His serially manipulative and controlling domestic abuse of young men, including one he pushed into deep depression and recklessness with his own life, and
- His aggressively over-styled and yet simultaneously DIY-looking hair.
I’m not insulted by the Tiger King’s political aspirations to be our President or Oklahoma’s Governor, or the fact that he thought about his park’s financial bottom line over a loyal employee’s lost limb in a tiger attack.
By giving us so, so many excellent reasons to hate him, the Tiger King makes us realize that we hate him most for mistreating tigers. We cannot understand how he had hundreds of them but failed to give a single one the awe it deserved by natural order. It’s shamefully senseless in way that all of his other misconduct is not (except maybe his hair).
The Tiger King took hours-old tigers away from their mother to sit them in the palms of his hands and parade them as stacks of money with lungs, and he published disturbing videos that called for violence on people who advocated against thinking of tiger cubs that way. The Tiger King showed us the hypocrisy of the “animal rights advocates” who we want to credit over him. He challenged me to think about why I would boycott his park, but go to an “animal sanctuary” where the same types of animals are also caged, displayed, limited, and shrunken into fragments of themselves small enough for me to take in with my naked eye.
I love the Tiger King because he accomplished what even my beloved Vengeful Tiger could not—the Tiger King made me realize that enough is enough. I love tigers, sincerely. But I will not go to a zoo or an animal park to see one ever again. I will not lie to myself about the dignity and good faith of an “animal sanctuary,” and allow myself to see them there either. The tiger is not supposed to answer to anyone, but as long as people like me clap for them and squeal at their babies, the Tiger King (and all of the other nutjobs on that show) will reign.
From the heart of Oklahoma to the parts of Siberia no road reaches, tigers are better than all of us—and this true even with dozens of our bullets inside them and our boots stomping down on their necks. Imagine how much better than us they would be if we just left them the hell alone.
All quotations above are from John Vaillant’s brilliant work, which is available for purchase here and here and here.
Studying the tiger’s ways together. 
She learns quick.