What If We Choose the Tiger?

When a tiger mauled a man to death at Yorkshire Wildlife Park, we might expect certain responses. The event was witnessed and videoed by horrified zoo attendees, and those videos have subsequently been passed around online. Such demonstrations provide rare exposure in our time to the barbarity and viciousness that so many Christian martyrs suffered when they were condemned to be torn apart by wild beasts.

While it is typical to consider our society to be more civilized than those of ancient Rome, the majority of responses on social media platforms demonstrated that onlookers were not appalled. In fact, they emphasized the importance of the tiger’s welfare, and expressed concern after zoo attendees reported that they had heard “the sound of gunshots.” To be clear: they were not concerned about the man, but the fate of the tiger. Later reports indicate that response teams at the zoo fired warning shots in the direction of the tiger. They did not shoot the tiger.

To cover this topic seems to require an abundance of statements that ought to be self-evident. Firstly, people should not enter tiger enclosures, and there is a good chance of being seriously harmed if they choose to do so. It is also true that when a human being is in danger from an animal, we should try to assist them, including by killing the animal that poses an active threat.

We still do not know why the young man chose to jump into the enclosure. It has been heavily speculated that he was mentally disabled, which seems to be a reasonable assumption, but he has not yet been publicly identified. Audio footage exists in which he asked an onlooker to take his picture in front of the tiger exhibit before he jumped only minutes later. We do know that a woman tried to stop him, but was not strong enough to do so.

As alarming as the attack itself was, the number of people who immediately favored the tiger in the altercation was far more so. A quick tweet regarding human worth became a highly controversial item:

Responses varied in their attempts at logic. Some were aghast at the very notion that human life could have more value, others attempted to reduce such value to a monetary figure, some reduced morality to a mere numbers game as to which species contains more members, and still others employed Darwinian understanding to justify allowing the man to die without assistance.

Those who claimed that a simplistic “survival of the fittest” Darwinian argument ought to settle the question failed to acknowledge that tigers face near extinction because of humans. So, if power is to be our moral standard, then the tiger would not fare well.

Often, the argument was convoluted to a misunderstanding as to why we should “punish” the tiger for “doing tiger things.” Shooting an attacking tiger is not about punishment, however, it is merely and specifically an action to save the life of a young man who was actively being killed. The incident was not the tiger’s “fault,” which is to say that the tiger does not bear moral culpability because it is incapable of that degree of reason.

That fact alone makes the point: tigers are lesser than humans in part because they lack that which makes humans unique. Tigers act largely based on instinct. Further, they are not made in the image and likeness of God, and they lack the uniquely human rational nature that endows us with the duty of moral responsibility. The human person possesses a dignity that the tiger cannot share.

These conclusions were once the basis of Christian society. That they should be considered confusing or difficult questions in modern America (and even more so in England) should make us shudder not only for our direction, but for what that entails. After all, the pre-eminent issues of our time converge on this topic of the unique nature and worth of man.

The willingness to abort children when they are disabled or inconvenient, the increasing acceptance of euthanasia at the end of life, and the misunderstanding about human value compared to animals, all express a complete failure of modernity to see man’s worth. Throughout Christendom, we would have pointed toward the Incarnation, in which God exalted Man by becoming one of us, as that further evidence of the importance of humanity—because of our importance to God. God uniquely dignified man’s nature by assuming it in the person of Christ. We would have pointed to His voluntary suffering and His request that we bear our own crosses as evidence for the redemptive nature of our tribulation and how such challenges do not reduce our inherent dignity. We would have asserted that because of who we are to Him, we are not defined by our suffering, our disabilities, or our weakness.

But now, people look at those who make foolish decisions as deserving of death by torture. They look at tigers as having the same or greater worth than that of a young man. They understand no distinctive difference between the life of a human and the prowling cat. May God have mercy on us.