No, I’m not a PETA nut.  I’m not even a crazy animal rights activist.  I’m just morally opposed to zoos and any places where animals are harbored purely for our entertainment.  Like Seaworld.  Killer whales were not put on this earth to smack balls into baskets with their fins for us.  Bears aren’t supposed to ride tricycles.  Horses aren’t supposed to high dive.  And so on and so forth.

Zoos and animal sanctuaries can have their merit.  I’m not opposed to helping endangered animals thrive by breeding and caring for them in captivity, nurturing them back to healthy numbers, and then releasing them back into the wild.  But do they really need to be put on display?  Every zoo I’ve been to, the animals look downtrodden and melancholy.  Some of them even look drugged for how sluggish and unresponsive they are.  Ooooo, yay!  I can see a tiger!  I’d much rather pay for a safari on the Serengeti and put myself in the cage while the animals run around their homes as they should.  Animals are much more majestic when they’re free to live.

So really, should we be all that surprised that a tiger jumped out of its compound at the San Francisco Zoo and mauled a kid to death after the dumbass kept pelting it with rocks?  And the police shot the tiger to death.  As if it was expected to be a little calico kitty.  Or what about when a full-grown chimp going, pardon the pun, ape shit on someone, literally ripping her face off, after being made to perform for most of its life, not to mention slapped on human mood stabilizers?  Really?  And again, the chimp died.

And now we got a killer whale (uh, hello?) that lived up to its name and started to eat its trainer during a live show down in Seaworld.  If my life were reduced to a performing monkey act, I’d probably want to eat my trainer too.

And let’s not forget Roy’s unfortunate run in with his own Siberian tiger at his show.  But the tiger was in good spirits before the show, they say!  Guys, it’s a fucking tiger.  Let’s get real here, okay?

Let me put it this way: the only reason dogs don’t eat our faces in the night is because they’ve been domesticated for 10,000 years.  And even then they still maintain that instinct that allows them to flip out on people for no apparent reason or provocation.  These performing animals?  They’re, what, two, maybe three generations born in captivity?  Do you really think you’ve bred the wild out of them in that short of a time span?  Please tell me people can’t be that stupid.

Go ahead and think I’m a heartless bitch for not really caring that yet another trainer got his ass eaten by a performance animal.  That’s the risk they take, isn’t it?  You had Steve Erwin doing all sorts of inappropriate things to exceptionally wild animals.  He put himself in that danger so the law of numbers would dictate that the probability he’d die by one of those ferocious animals would increase dramatically.  Not a shock that he ended up going out that way.  And the Grizzly Man living his life with wild grizzly bears.  Are we really that surprised that he was mauled to death by one?  Duh?

It’s like being surprised that a race car driver dies racing his car.  You’d think it’d almost be inevitable considering the risk involved in doing something like that.  You put yourself in that risk.  So don’t be surprised if you die by it.  These aren’t kittens and puppies and cute little teddy bears.  They.  Are.  Wild.  Animals.  Period.  They function on pure instinct.  Just because you’ve trained it to toss a ball in a basket doesn’t mean it isn’t plotting your death.