No one thinks anything about wild horses being domesticated. We ride them. Or cattle. We eat them, as well as pigs and sheep. Don't make me go off on chickens that live boxed existences till their heads are lopped off. And take house cats; they are not like dogs. Man has never quite bred all their instinct from them. That's why they still hunt mice and birds. The difference with lions and tigers, which are smarter than house cats, is that we don't eat them. We can't ride them. They are no good for pulling machinery. They can only be used to do tricks or to watch. And as tame as they might become from being raised from cubs, they cannot understand their own strength, nor the fact that humans do not have thick enough skin to withstand their teeth the same as their kind. When Roy of Siegfried and Roy was mauled by his pet tiger, everyone thought it had attacked him. Rather, it was trying to protect him by carrying him off stage. It just could not understand that what would work for one of its cubs would kill a human being. The bottom line is that it is not about lions or tigers being left to their own in the wild; it's all about real estate and the fact that we are not willing to allow them free reign as hunters over "our" planet. In the end, the only lions or tigers that survive will be the ones kept in zoos. But the truth is that a lion or tiger that grows up in a human environment is no more or less happy or unhappy than a horse that is raised on a ranch or a farm. The life that it has grown up into is all that it knows. What is cruel, on the other hand, is taking an intelligent wild animal and forcing it to live in a cage.
Review of Two Brothers
