As I was writing the latest chapter of my book, The Children Of Wolves, while sitting in my family’s home outside Colchester, I overheard the news speaking of a fatal tiger attack at a Yorkshire zoo. I looked up the gruesome footage, mercifully edited. In it I watched William Chapman, who was clearly not in his right mind, through illness or medication or some combination of the two, sat on the ground as an almost equally confused Siberian tiger – the largest of all the big cats – attempted to find a way to attack a body shape it had never before encountered as prey, and most particularly one that didn’t run away.
The man proceeded to tell off the tiger in the finger-wagging manner of an affronted passenger at an airline check-in desk. It may have been this that allowed the tiger to discern that on bipeds, as we say in anatomy, the ventral actually is the anterior, and so the underside of the throat – the universal feline target of choice – is held vertically. Soon, the man was dead.
The human response was almost as disturbing as the footage. Across social media and that equally fetid undergrowth of the comments section of published media, self-proclaimed-animal lovers and self-appointed experts were celebrating the death of a human being because of his own stupidity. Environmentalism seems increasingly to have become a virtuous, load-bearing structure for misanthropy, one reason why the sensible ones among us have reverted to calling ourselves conservationists.
This brings me back to my book. The chapter I was writing when I learnt of the tiger attack opens with me smoking a cigarette with a twelve-bore shotgun slung over my shoulder. It is a real scene. It was November 2013, and I had heard that a wolf pack had escaped from Colchester Zoo just two miles away and was heading my direction. Five of the six animals escaped after animal rights activists cut the fence of their enclosure. One returned itself, another was successfully tranquillised, and three were shot dead. Not one had attacked anyone, but they were a threat, and tranquilisers don’t work the way people think they do. In order to overload that amount of adrenaline, you are delivering a dose that will either disorientate and confuse an animal with teeth in the vicinity of innocent people, or one that will kill it anyway, just slower.
There is an extraordinary cruelty in the actions of people who claim to love animals so much that they will liberate them from captivity while signing their death warrants. Yet there is a strange symmetry between such activists and those celebrating the death of the man in Yorkshire. In both cases, the romantic ideal of the wild animal seems to take precedence over the actual welfare of any animal, human or non-human. For we are all part of the Kingdom Animalia.
There was another, equally revealing response to the Yorkshire tragedy: widespread and performative congratulations to the zoo for its supposedly unprecedentedly enlightened decision not to euthanise the tiger, named Altai. In fact, there was nothing exceptional about it at all. Looking at the most recent eight fatal tiger attacks in captivity in Europe and North America, in six of them the tiger was left untouched. In the other two, the animals were shot during the emergency itself.
One, remarkably, was also a Siberian tiger named Altai, shot after fatally injuring a keeper at Cologne Zoo in 2012 by the director of the zoo himself through a skylight in an attempt to save the keeper. The principle is straightforward: a captive animal is not killed for behaving according to its nature. It is only in the wild where one is trying to prevent repetition where the lethal option becomes unavoidable. Within the cage, recurrence can be prevented by reviewing safety precautions.This is why, when an elephant deliberately killed a keeper at London Zoo in 2001, the animal was merely transferred to Whipsnade.
A study published in Frontiers in Ethology earlier this year examined 1,047 recorded accidents involving captive wild animals since 1815. Tigers lead the list with 72 fatal incidents. Lions lag behind at 41. Elephants were responsible for 77, but the figures don’t distinguish Asian from African species. (Wolves only killed two.) Returning to the consequences of homicide, in the strictest sense, the pendulum of sentimentality can swing too far in the opposite direction.
One animal which has acquired a strangely anthropomorphic status in the public imagination is the orca. The documentary Blackfish told the story of Tilikum, the enormous male killer whale who drowned his 20-year-old female trainer in Sealand in Canada in 1991. He was then transferred to SeaWorld in Florida where trainers were not informed of his past. In 1999, a male trespasser was found dead in his pool. In 2010, another female trainer was dragged into the water and killed. Tilikum died of a lung infection seven years later, and the same amount older than the average lifespan of a male wild orca.
I am certainly not proposing that we execute orcas for killing humans: I don’t think they should be in captivity at all. However, somewhere between animal rights activists condemning innocent wolves to death and celebrating that of humans – and marine parks keeping lethally dangerous animals performing without fully informing their human handlers of the risks – we have lost sight of a rather basic truth.
Non-human animals are neither morally innocent nor morally guilty: they exist in an altogether different ethical space. It is only humans who have moral responsibilities, and those responsibilities exist in different ways and at different levels when it comes to other animals. We swerve to avoid antelope but not avoid ants, we eat cattle but do not eat cats. However, to our fellow humans, the duty is absolute.
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