Tigers About The House Episode 1

This week, BBC2 shows a three part documentary, Tigers About The House, which looks at a pair of Sumatran tiger cubs being hand reared at home by a zoo keeper in Australia.

Anything that brings publicity for this endangered species is good, but finding out about the programme, we were expecting a little controversy to be stirred up. None of the previews mentioned a reason for them being hand reared, meaning that we were expecting resistance, at the very least, from viewers of the Born Free mentality, and perhaps even more widespread if they had been taken from their mother and domesticated without a legitimate reason such as rejection at birth.

It was interesting to see Australia Zoo's approach to conservation awareness, allowing visitors to get up close and touch animals such as camels and wallabies in the hope that it would encourage the public to support conservation efforts. However, the issue of domesticating these wild animals to the point that the public can interact with them is something that has been phased out in the majority of zoos in recent years, and is not something that we necessarily agree with. The programme even showed the tigers performing in a tiger show, despite many people believing that captive animals should not be made to perform, no matter how endangered or in need of publicity their species is.

It was revealed in the first episode that the reason for the cubs being removed from their mother, was not to do with rejection, or danger, but mainly influenced by the zoo's desire to continue their practice of directly handling these animals into the next generation - they wanted to domesticate the cubs from birth so that their keepers could continue to enter their enclosures, rather than keeping their distance as is standard practice in most zoos,

That's not to say that Giles doesn't have the best intentions, and doesn't do an excellent job at raising the cubs - he does. But that doesn't mean that everyone agrees with their decision to handle the animals and remove two healthy cubs from their mother to satisfy human desires.

Let's see what the next episode brings tomorrow.