Play With your Cat

We can take the cat out of the jungle, but we can't take the jungle out of the cat. There is a little tiger in every house cat, a solitary predator, that needs to exercise its hunting skills on a regular basis. We may have confined this little tiger within four walls, provided it with the finest of feline foods, but we can't ignore its basic need to do that for which it was so perfectly designed--to hunt. Fortunately, it is not always necessary for the prey to be alive, but it must move.

White Tigers

 Privately owned pet tigers and other big cats (lions, cougars, mountain lions, and leopards) are an obscure reality, yet their true presence is wildly exaggerated by special interest groups and the news media. While many exotic pets have tremendous popularity, big cats, for obvious reasons, are not commonly kept. Due to the negligence of a few, the few true owners of ‘pet’ big cats frequently make headlines and bans are prompted of other exotic animals that are of little or no danger to people beyond a cat or dog. The reason may be that the public views the idea of a ‘backyard tiger’, which is a tiger maintained in a non-professional zoo-like setting, with disdain, but not all so-called backyards (or owners) are equivalent. There are reasonable ways to bring about the proper husbandry of big cats, as long as the owner’s lifestyle fits specific criteria without exception.