Tiger and Me See the

¶ … Tiger and Me see the tiger, lying in the sun. I walk up the walkway and view her through a wire mesh that separates her from me. The setting looks so natural as she lies there, by a little manmade brook. Perhaps she knows she cannot get to me, but I know I cannot get to her.

I wonder, then, what it would be like to be walking through a forest in India, and come upon a beautiful glade, with trees and a little stream, and a lovely tiger stretched out by the water. What would I do? There would be no wire mesh to hide behind. Would she notice me? Would she be hungry? Would she be as curious about me as I am about her right now? The experts call that "anthropomorphism," when a human sees human traits in an animal.

No, she does not think in the same ways humans do, but surely she must think, or else how could she plan the best way to catch an antelope? If I came upon this tiger in the wild, she would not be curious about me. She would simply judge whether I was a potential meal, whether she was hungry, and whether she had a decent chance of catching me. They say that the biggest difference between humans and animals is that humans know they are mortal.

This tiger knows about mortality, but she knows it differently than I do. I know that I will die some day, and that if that wire mesh were not there, or if I had come upon her in the forest of India, I might be looking at the thing that would soon kill me. She does not look at death that way. She does not know that she is alive, or that she will die some day, but she understands death. Death is life for her.

Death is food for her cubs. But I am safe. I am here, behind the mesh. She gets up, and stretches. Except for her enormous size, she might be a house cat stretching after a nice nap on the windowsill. She walks serenely by. I know that muscles ripple under her striped fur, but they do not show the power they must have as she strolls sedately to another spot. She is safe, too. She does not have to hunt for her meals.

She does not risk having a jaw or tooth broken from the hoof of fleeing prey. For myself, the wire mesh is a trade-off. It interferes slightly with my view but keeps me safe. What does the tiger think of her trade-off? She is safe, but she will never hunt. Does she know? Does she care? The keeper comes to feed the tigers in this enclosure. I can hear the boot steps, and I hear metal against metal, twice.

Then metal bars in a cave cut into the man-made hillside rise, and the tigers can go in to get.