Since it appears I’m having a conversation with myself here these days and no one is around to call me cruel or heartless, I’ll go one step further on this tiger nonsense. Now Roy’s buddy Siegfried is telling us that the tiger didn’t maul Roy, but that Roy fell down and the tiger was trying to (ahem) help him offstage.

“A tiger, when he grabs you, it’s the strength,” Fischbacher said. “He thinks it’s another tiger, and another tiger has [thick] skin like this, and the fur.”

This is all starting to come together now. A few notes from the previous article about Roy and his tigers:

• A modern day Dr. Doolittle who called the cats his children
  
• Horn has been on hand for many of their births.
  
• “The first voice they hear is mine, the first touch they feel is mine, the first human face they see is mine,” Horn said in an interview in late 2000. “They just think I’m a strange tiger who walks on two legs.”

Well, there you go. Convince a tiger that you’re a flamboyant, two-legged tiger and I guess he treats you like a tiger.

Note to tiger-men worldwide: don’t fall down in front of a tiger.

Let me preface this by saying that I’m neither happy nor amused that this guy got chewed up by a tiger. It’s tragic and sad. I mean that. However, it never ceases to amaze me how easily we’re amazed by stuff that shouldn’t amaze us. What’s amazing, really, is that it took forty years for one of these big cats to get fed up with being dragged around on a leash by guys with fifteen hundred dollar hairstyles and too much makeup. A tiger is a tiger is a tiger, and I’m relatively confident that God didn’t make them to live and work on a stage in Vegas. I’m just as confident that God didn’t make humans to live in community with wild animals capable of biting them in half. Again, what happened to Mr. Roy is very sad, but sometimes this stuff satirizes itself. What’s sadder — that the tiger fought back or that this guy thinks the chief end of his life is to live in harmony with Mother Nature by doing yoga with white tigers who prefer their meals bloody and raw? Both are tragedies, but I submit that the latter is of greater eternal significance than the former.

(….chalk this one up as an attempt to squeeze out a nomination for PC blogger of the year.)