Play with baby lions/tigers/etc at a UK zoo?

I'll let you pet this lion for a £1000

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Indie said:
I'd agree with this to be honest. near enough every domestic animal in our homes today is descended from its wild ancestors.

I've got two huskies and they are one of the 14 ancient dog breeds, directly descended from wolves. They are not working dogs (at least at the moment) but still need an insane amount of attention to (as Fox said) keep them healthy, well fed, mentally active... Its not like owning a golden retriever ...!

I personally don't see a problem with handling young animals, providing they are in the right environment and given the care they need (i.e. not drugged up!).

I recall reading something a few years back of a bloke that lives in my local area who kept a big cat as a pet. IIRC it was a tiger. I'll try and find a link!
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Near here!

Having said that. My understanding of this is that Lions are actually relatively easy to tame. They are social animals so will accept being part of a group.

Cheetah have temperaments very similar to domestic cats and, if adopted from kitten-hood make good house pets, The fact that Cheetah in the wild would not normally attack an animal as large and dangerous as a Human (#) also helps.

Tigers OTOH are solitary animals. The consensus amongst animal handlers is that they cannot be tamed and can never be trusted! Sooner or later he will eat you!

(# It is easy to forget that Humans are actually one of the Larger animals on the African plains and are regarded by all the other animals as extremely dangerous! Even the big predators will generally keep well away from Humans!)
 
I couldn't find it, I saw little snippets of where it was mentioned, but no actual artical published online. Its actually not too dissimilar from your Woking link :D

I'm pretty sure it was in Quarry Bank or something equally as obscure (and terrifying!)

In my search though I did find a family in Brazil that are fighting to keep their Tigers. they have a whole family of them. As well as a couple in Africa that have a one year old tiger as a pet. gets on with the dogs too :D
 
FoxEye said:
They aren't for the most part working animals these days. They are pets. Yes it explains their origins, but not our current motivations for owning them. Humans like animals, like to live with and keep animals.

I don't see a problem, for example, with wanting to own a serval. If you can care for it, keep it well fed, healthy, mentally active, why not? There's nothing I hate more than the people who think they should interfere in someone else's life out of some kind of moral superiority complex.

Tell me why should we limit ourselves to just the existing domestic breeds? Why shouldn't we be looking to domesticate other animals? For fun? For companionship?

Today we have cats and dogs.. tomorrow, why not domesticate something else?
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there is no good reason for not owning something like a serval or similar sized animal that i can see, just animal rights and health and safety types over here mean that its unlikely we will domesticate new breeds for pleasure.
 
My wife works in a zoo.

This type of practice is majorly frowned upon. Doubt you can do it in the UK
 
Interesting set of responses! The consensus seems to be that it's immoral to go ahead of pet exotic animals in a zoo.

From a conservational and animal welfare perspective, zoos are terrible compared to other conservational alternatives. Animal welfare issues are obvious as you simply cannot reflect a natural environment in a small pen. Even small animals might freely roam around an area of dozens of square miles. From a conservational perspective its even worse. As far as I'm aware, you can count all the successful zoo reintroductions on one hand. If all the money spent on zoos was spent on conserving habitats, not on protecting individual species, so many more species could be saved, including the ones that we consider important because they are fluffy, cute, or otherwise impressive.

I don't think zoos are a wholly bad thing though. They give people like me and you the opportunity to see beautiful animals that we otherwise wouldn't be able to see. The only reason anyone can justify a zoo is for the purely selfish reason of saying they like looking at exotic animals. Any other reason is completely bogus. I quite like visiting the zoo myself.

Why say all this? Well, I find it slightly bogus that people think petting some of these animals would be considered cruel and immoral yet they say so being oblivious to the obvious. To me, taking a tiger and plonking it in a pathetic enclosure to be gawked at by thousands of people is a distinctly worse step than subsequently taking that tiger as a cub and letting a child play with it for a few minutes. If it's done properly, I don't really see the issue. It's a tiny extension to a great big environmental **** up.

Just my 2 pennies.
 
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Nitefly said:
Interesting set of responses! The consensus seems to be that it's immoral to go ahead of pet exotic animals in a zoo.

From a conversational and animal welfare perspective, zoos are terrible compared to other conversational alternatives. Animal welfare issues are obvious as you simply cannot reflect a natural environment in a small pen. Even small animals might freely roam around an area of dozens of square miles. From a conversational perspective its even worse. As far as I'm aware, you can count all the successful zoo reintroductions on one hand. If all the money spent on zoos was spent on conserving habitats, not on protecting individual species, so many more species could be saved, including the ones that we consider important because they are fluffy, cute, or otherwise impressive.

I don't think zoos are a wholly bad thing though. They give people like me and you the opportunity to see beautiful animals that we otherwise wouldn't be able to see. The only reason anyone can justify a zoo is for the purely selfish reason of saying they like looking at exotic animals. Any other reason is completely bogus. I quite like visiting the zoo myself.

Why say all this? Well, I find it slightly bogus that petting some of these animals would be considered cruel and immoral. To me, taking a tiger and plonking it in a pathetic enclosure to be gawked at by thousands of people is a distinctly worse step than subsequently taking that tiger as a cub and letting a child play with it for a few minutes. If it's done properly, I don't really see the issue. It's a tiny extension to a great big environmental **** up.

Just my 2 pennies.
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I have never been to a zoo and I don't think I ever will.

I guess I don't like zoos. I rather watch Planet Earth on TV than to visit a zoo. I guess I my wild animals, wild, even if they are in pixels.
 
Haven't been to the zoo since I was a teenager.
They had a massive gorilla and you only had to look in his eyes to see he hated his existence there. I felt awful for being part of the gawking crowd.

Never again.
 
Nitefly said:
Interesting set of responses! The consensus seems to be that it's immoral to go ahead of pet exotic animals in a zoo.

From a conservational and animal welfare perspective, zoos are terrible compared to other conservational alternatives. Animal welfare issues are obvious as you simply cannot reflect a natural environment in a small pen. Even small animals might freely roam around an area of dozens of square miles. From a conservational perspective its even worse. As far as I'm aware, you can count all the successful zoo reintroductions on one hand. If all the money spent on zoos was spent on conserving habitats, not on protecting individual species, so many more species could be saved, including the ones that we consider important because they are fluffy, cute, or otherwise impressive.

I don't think zoos are a wholly bad thing though. They give people like me and you the opportunity to see beautiful animals that we otherwise wouldn't be able to see. The only reason anyone can justify a zoo is for the purely selfish reason of saying they like looking at exotic animals. Any other reason is completely bogus. I quite like visiting the zoo myself.

Why say all this? Well, I find it slightly bogus that people think petting some of these animals would be considered cruel and immoral yet they say so being oblivious to the obvious. To me, taking a tiger and plonking it in a pathetic enclosure to be gawked at by thousands of people is a distinctly worse step than subsequently taking that tiger as a cub and letting a child play with it for a few minutes. If it's done properly, I don't really see the issue. It's a tiny extension to a great big environmental **** up.

Just my 2 pennies.
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I do think keeping animals in a Zoo where they get gawped at by joe public is cruel, but zoos do play an important conservation role and gain their money from ticket sales, if they purely had the most endangered animals that needed to be there the zoo would not be a very interesting place to visit and would make no money. obviously they are a business as well.

I consider it cruel to distress animals that have no interest having contact with humans so that they might pet them, granted one or two people coming in and petting a cute cub might not bother it but having streams of people constantly in there would do, and lets face it most of us would want to pet a cute baby tiger cub if it was allowed.
 
I have worked with zoos on quite a few projects and the one thing they have all had in common is the people who work in them absolutely love the wildlife and are very passionate.

Personally I am not a fan of animals being kept that would normally have a large range or behaviours which can not be accommodated in captivity but there you go.

Zoos for the most part make very little money but as pointed out many have conservation programmes related to wild animals as well as breeding programmes. Often they are active in conservation of species which do not sell tickets so need the big game / gorillas etc. (and preferably with their babies) to attract the public.

While I do have some misgivings about zoos, seeing how passionate those who work in them are, has always made me feel better about it.
 
Rich1988 said:
I consider it cruel to distress animals that have no interest having contact with humans so that they might pet them, granted one or two people coming in and petting a cute cub might not bother it but having streams of people constantly in there would do, and lets face it most of us would want to pet a cute baby tiger cub if it was allowed.
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Skidder said:
While I do have some misgivings about zoos, seeing how passionate those who work in them are, has always made me feel better about it.
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Very fair observations! As for the conservation, yes there are 'breeding programmes' and 'studies' that take place, but they are, frankly, bad compared to the alternatives. I think the statistic is something like for every £1 that is spent on conservation in zoos, it would 10,000 times more effective at protecting diversity if it was spent protecting natural habitats, which is a bit of a downer! I'm not saying that zoos are a bad thing, I think they are great fun, but you can't really justify them with the idea of conservation. On the flip side, it's good that zoos do attempt to offset the balance with their breeding programmes etc and it's also good that they raise awareness of fascinating animals :)
 
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