It was bound to happen. As the pet stakes rose ever higher, with Huskies and chimps and boa constrictors and squirrels for the children to pull around in their toy cars, somebody was going to come along and really push at those pet boundaries. It’s not so much a case of keeping up with the Camilleris as aspiring and achieving so far beyond them that they can never hope to keep up with you. Eat my pet dust, sir. You’ve got an Alaskan sledge-dog on your roof. I’ve got a Bengal tiger on mine.
Bengal tigers have always been, as far back in human history as I can rummage, the greatest animal status symbol of them all, several steps higher than a lion. They have never been pets in the proper sense of the word, because you can’t really bond with a tiger nor have it run around the living-room (but then dogs don’t run around the living-room in Malta, either). Tigers were kept as symbols of power and wealth: power because a tiger will kill anyone who enters its territory and so required a large number of dispensable slaves to control it; and wealth because until the late 20th century, only the comfortably-off could afford to eat meat, and only the spectacularly rich could throw whole cows to the resident tiger - or slaves, depending on which happened to be cheaper and more available at the time.
Tigers were kept by princes and emperors. They were not kept by otherwise ordinary people with rather a lot of money, slaves and cattle to expend. That’s because, in less democratic times than ours, you acquired one of the ultimate symbols of power and prestige at your peril. It could have been taken as a direct challenge and an affront to those with real power.
The Bengal tiger cub that was found by investigating officers on a Mosta rooftop, fed chickens and provided with an air-conditioned rest area, is little more than a contemporary version of this age-old theme. It is extraordinary that over the course of a couple of thousand years, so much of human behaviour has changed but certain peculiarities have not. A Bengal tiger remains a huge status symbol, perhaps more so now that the species is threatened with extinction and trade in the creatures is heavily policed than back in the days when the whole of North Africa and the Syro-Palestine region were systematically stripped of their big cats and elephants to feed the amphitheatres of the Roman world.
The difficulty is that owning a Bengal tiger today is like owning that other top status symbol, one of Picasso’s major works. You’ve got to lock it up, show it to nobody, and it’s best to let no one know you have it - just in case the wrong people come calling. And that sets one up in a bit of a conundrum, because the whole point of status symbols is that as many other people as possible get to know about them and register your status accordingly. A secret status symbol might seem like a contradiction in itself, but it isn’t quite. If there were not people about who derive immense satisfaction and a thrilling power-kick from owning something really quite extraordinary, but for their eyes only, then there would be no market in master paintings and ancient wonders stolen to commission.
Officers of the Animal Welfare Department, the police and the environment and planning authority raided the Mosta premises after receiving reports that a tiger-cub was running around on the roof. This unprecedented situation seems to have left the lot of them at a loss. Leaving the tiger where it is, they retreated to investigate whether all its papers are in order and that it does not have illegal status under the draconian rules of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, to which Malta is a signatory. If the tiger’s papers are fine - but they are unlikely to be, because importing a Bengal tiger by the proper channels would have entailed some negotiation with the Customs Department at least - then there is nothing that the police and the rest of those officials can do. You need a licence to keep a television, but you don’t need a licence to keep a tiger, or a lethal cobra.
Whether a law (or for that matter, the absence of one) is a sensible thing can be seen by testing it to its limits. There is no law to prevent us keeping tigers or venomous snakes at home, without a licence and in strictly regulated and monitored conditions. One person keeps a tiger on a roof - fine. Ten people keep cobras in tanks in their garages - fine. But if more and more people bring in tigers, lions and cobras, then suddenly it’s not fine. It becomes a serious problem. I would say that it is a problem already, because there is no way a Bengal tiger, a huge animal that needs plenty of prowling territory, can be looked after properly on a Mosta rooftop by somebody who isn’t trained to look after tigers.
The smaller the area in which this animal is kept, the more often it is going to have to be cleaned. Somebody is going to have to do that cleaning, and we have a rather nasty accident waiting to happen. There was a comment beneath the news story on the internet that tigers are like cats, and that if they are handled by human beings from birth they will become tame, as cats do. Tigers are nothing like cats. It is precisely this kind of mixture of presumption and ignorance that would have led the owner, without slaves, a large estate or a herd of cattle to keep it fed, to think that keeping a Bengal tiger on a Mosta roof would be a doddle - just a little bit more complicated than the Camilleris and their Husky.
Cats are domesticated; Bengal tigers are not. No matter how much they are handled from birth, how they are trained to do their master’s bidding by jumping through hoops of fire and holding out paws like dogs, they remain Bengal tigers. When they feel like killing somebody who is getting on their nerves, they will. They will kill even their trainers - perhaps especially their trainers - their guards, and their keepers in zoos. Keeping a Bengal tiger is an act of pure insanity for those who are not in a situation to buy a few new slaves at the next market, to look after it, when the tiger has eaten last month’s purchases.
As a liberal, I would say let this man keep his tiger if he wishes to have his passion consume him. We don’t stop people climbing Everest because they might die. But as somebody who has had from childhood a horror of cages and the imprisonment of non-domesticated animals, I say that this tiger must be saved from the terrible fate of a life spent on a small Mosta rooftop, and delivered to expert care because it cannot be released into the wild at this stage.
And as somebody who is fiercely averse to irrational thinking, I say that there’s something very wrong somewhere when the old Miracle dinghy lying neglected in our garden is licensed and registered, the car parked under the tree is too, but the tigers leaping over it and chewing on the random limbs of trespassers don’t have to be.
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