The recent story about the escaped tiger killing a man (and mauling two others) in San Fran has got me pondering wild things. No particular train of thought, just lots of images. Sparked, no doubt, by Mr. McEnroe's latest column, and Mr. McCarthy's musings as well.
Remember those underwater tiger photos that hit the internet a few months back? (from Russia, no less, where they know how to keep things contained, for the most part)
The title of this post is a story by Ray Bradbury, which has been rolling through my head. No tygers (or tigers) in the story, really - but I was actually thinking of the plot of another Bradbury short story called The Veldt - although there were lions in that story, not tigers. I think I've commented before how wonderfully corruptive and seductive Mr. Bradbury's stories were to a pre-teen loner like me. I think I had two collections, "R is for Rocket" and "The Illustrated Man" - purchased no doubt from Scholastica books through the periodic bookmobile that came through our catholic school. The nuns, I am sure, had no idea how subversive this stuff was and is.
And looking around for something else Tygerish, I come across Blake's "The Tyger", quoted in Bradbury's Farenheit 451. Odd. Neat. I seem to remember another short story about a tiger hunter in India - but can not put my finger on it.
And I'm thinking about zoos, and circuses, and wild animals in general (having recently read Water for Elephants will do that). We're so busy destroying habitat and colonizing wild places and pushing our habitat into that occupied by wild things, then we get all up in arms when they dare to mess with Homo Sapiens....
On some level, I sort of wish for a Star Trekkian world, where we humans can wander off into the galaxy and leave this little planet as a wild game preserve.
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