News Nation-
A tiger handler in Oklahoma was fatally mauled by a tiger in his care Saturday, according to officials at the private preserve.
Ryan Easley was the operator of the Growler Pines Tiger Preserve near Hugo, Oklahoma, and the mauling was described as an accident. more
Article:
Accident? No, I’m pretty sure the tiger knew what it was doing.
So, it was a mostly peaceful mauling, then? Was the kitty purring? Asking for a politician.
Tiger handlers… They’re GREEAAAT!
Tiger Eye for the Queer Guy
One of my favorite poems by the great English poet Wm. Blake is Tyger, Tyger. The first verse reads: Tyger, Tyger, burning bright. In the forest of the night, What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?…. To me this whole poem speaks of the miracles of God’s creation.
They’re not pets. They’re beautiful but predatory killing machines. Don’t go near them.
In quiring minds want to know: Wuz it carrying a prayer rug?
I don’t care if the tiger was raised from a cub. The wild instincts in the tigers goes back eons. Foolish man.
It was an “accident.” At work, therefore and “industial acvident.” Somekne failed to follow their LOTO process.
LOTO: Lock Out – Tag Out
It was that goddamn Carol Baskins
Taste like chicken.
Every job has its risk.
Police officers can get shot.
Firefighters can get burnt.
Tiger handlers can get eaten.
It just comes with the territory.
If you dont find the risks acceptable, dont do the job. I grew up with housecats and so do not like the idea of being redered by claws, torn by teeth, and ending the day as feline scat.
So I dont try to handle tigers.
As a result, I have a DRAMATICALLY lower risk of being eaten by tigers.
See how that works?
…but in ALL those jobs above and many others, its axiomatic that complacency kills. You get too used to it going your way and get lazy, lose your sense of danger, get to where youre just punching a clock because youve done all this a million times before.
Thats when it kills you.
When you stop respecting the danger.
Like most OSHA rules, distilled down = “Don’t do stupid shit”. I would include playing around with full grown predators like tigers in that …
Conservative Cowgirl “The wild instincts in the tigers goes back eons.” That goes for domesticated cats, too!
Had my share of angry kittie scratches and bites. Scratches get infected, bites (especially near joints) give you bartonellosis (cat scratch fever).
I got that back in the late 80s when I was playing with my Asher and lost my mind thinking it would be funny to jiggle his tummy when he wasn’t expecting it. After I yelled when he bit my finger, the poor boy ran terrified that I was yelling.
I washed my injury (second knuckle of my pointer finger) and found Asher to comfort him. As the day progressed, my finger started swelling, but I didn’t think anything of it. Next day at work, I showed it to a co-worker (who used to be a nurse) and she told me to go see the employee nurse. I laughed, but she insisted, so I went. Imagine my surprise when she said to call my doctor and get in immediately.
So, I went and when he had me press my finger down in his, he asked how far up my arm the pain went. It went just passed the elbow. He gave me antibiotics and instructions to go home, wrap my finger in a warm cloth and stay home from work for two days. He almost admitted me to the hospital but decided I’d listen to his instructions when he told me that the poison was heading for my heart.
From then on, I called Asher my little-big cat!
A good rule of thumb is:
If yer kitty consumes 10lbs of meat or more per day, yew may have a problem!
Little Black Sambo
Claudia
Wednesday, 24 September 2025, 14:08 at 2:08 pm
“Had my share of angry kittie scratches and bites.”
…and I suspect you, like me, saw those come out of NOWHERE. You and kitty are just happily playing, claws retracted, gentle love bites that do no damage, then all the sudden Mittens gets SUPER offended for no reason YOU can see, and out come the claws and in go the teeth.
Cats transition without warning, I suspect WILD ones doubly so. All that fur hides a psychopathic mind.
“Scratches get infected, bites (especially near joints) give you bartonellosis (cat scratch fever).”
…I got that around ’88, it wasnt NEARLY as fun as Ted Nuget makes it sound, I was getting an IV drip in-hospital for a WEEK to get over it, even though there were cats in the house I grew up in my entire life.
Side note; this was pre-Internet days so an active young man could get VERY bored in a hospital room forever. It was still possible to smoke in hospitals at the time (I was not on oxygen so I did), but heaping a hospital-logo ashtray full all day gets pretty boring too.
Now, at registration I had checked my “Faith” box as “Catholic” since thats how my parents raised me (and it was a Catholic hospital too, so brownie points?), but my ACTUAL faith at the time was somewhere between “Agnostic” and “Leave me alone with that nonsense, willya?”. But, because I had checked the box, an old Catholic priest entered my self-smogged lair and, after sitting down below the smoke line and some preliminary Latinite incantations, asked me if I would like to partake in Communion. Being the smartass young heathen not really feeling Death’s shadow at that point, I rather flippantly replied “Sure, what the hell”.
The priest, rightly suspecting I would not be recieving the Body of Christ with the reverence it deserved and therefore that it would just be ashes in my disrespectful mouth, rightly withheld the Sacrament from me.
But, wrongly, he then snatchec up all his stuff and departed in a huff, never to be seen by me again.
…Ive wondered at times if my life would have been made better, if I could have turned to the Lord earlier, if I could have saved everyone a LOT of heartache I was to cause later on, had that Man of God instead of leaving had tried as our Lord did, as HIS Master did, to have tried to actually SAVED the sinner instead of just walking away from a strayed sheep as he did. Yes, I was flippant, but I was both sober and bored and would have entertained ANYTHING, even a Biblical dressing-down, to watching whatever Days of Our Lives was on about today or staring out the window at the doubtlessly Legonella-filled chiller tower blocking my view of pretty much everything.
I would have been the PERFECT captive audience for a Jesus-bringing preacher, and may even have actually LISTENED. A small time investment from a convicted diciple may well have literally saved an insolent soul.
But we will never know, because he did not TRY.
I have said much here about it us the duty of everyone to do what they can to save a life. While this comes up usually in the context of PHYSICAL life, by no means do I mean to balk at the SPIRITUAL life as well.
If saving a life is rewarded that a person is granted more time on Earth, then how much BETTER to save a SOUL that grants them all of ETERNETY with the LORD…
“That tiger didn’t go crazy. That tiger went tiger.”
– Chris Rock,
“He understood the risks, not out of recklessness, but out of love.” Guess what, buddy, love hurts!
Even a house cat has its boiling point.
All kinds of animals can get mad and turn on the ones that love it. Not just house cats. I’ve been around cats for decades and never got a serious scratch. If they don’t like something, they hiss as a warning.
Now, I like dogs too, but my parents had one that bit me on the nose. I had a long narrow 1/2 inch dark-colored scar on my nose for a few weeks, then it dropped off. It looked like a dried booger. I was embarrassed.