Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cS5wINA53g

I knew that the US had crazy laws regaurding the legality of private ownership of wild animals (the fact that many states allow the private ownership of things like lions and tigers, not private as in things like zoos, but as in kept as "pets"), but this goes WAAAAAAAY beyond even that.

The reason I posted it here is that I am sure that some of you live in states where crap like this is permitted.

A) A lot of what they are doing is not permitted. They get away with it because it's unenforceable.
B) Who the **** cares? Animals are animals.

While bred over thousands of years to be obedient, I don't see how this is much different than our assumption that we can "own" other pets. While I've loved my Animals to a degree of humanness, I still have never found pet ownership to be good for the animal or a particularly moral act. It would be disturbing to us if an alien species kept us as pets.

There was a guy in NYC a few years ago that had a Tiger. A ****ING TIGER. How do your neighbors not hear that?

while i didnt really feel any tugging at the ol' heart strings over tiger cubs being "taken from their mothers" after all most pets are at a very early age, i think it is the height of stupidity for someone to own a tiger or any other large cat. even if you have a completely docile and "domesticated" tiger think about it this way. a tiger is pretty much a HUGE house cat. even well behaved cats get agitated and will take a swat at you from time to time. when a grown tiger takes a swat at you...
in a lot of cases this unfortunately leads to the animals being abandoned or put down once they get too big to "manage". pretty crappy stuff all around.

Ownership of chimpanzees need to be outlawed. I don't understand what's "adorable" about those primate monsters.

Yeah, who cares? Forcing a species into extinction and then screwing up an entire ecosystem isn't something we should be worrying about.

I have a question do any of you guys have a cat or dog?

I love my dog, but afaik dogs aren't a badly endangered species.

neither are cats.

see what i did there.

but i dont think its so much the "owning" a tiger that constitutes a threat to the species, probably more that they are taken from the wild population rather than bred?

dear god i couldnt agree more!!! as they start to get older they just become downright terrifying!

i have never had a pet nor will i ever, animals belong in the wild, sure many animals like dogs may live a happy life under a human owner than out in the wild, but thats not our choice to make

Actually, this sort of thing will preserve the species. Tigers mate in captivity just fine.

But, disregarding that argument and pretending your worry is valid : So what? We are the masters of this world, period. If we want big cats to go extinct, they will. If they want to save themselves, they damn well better evolve thumbs. **** goes extinct all the time. Tigers aren't special, and there's no reason we should want to save an animal that can eat us.

If another country is worried about their tigers then it's up to them to protect them. Until then, if they're on the market, we can choose to buy.



What he said. Why do people believe the things that HUMANS do isn't natural, yet anything any other species on the planet does somehow IS natural?

Because we hold ourselves higher than nature.

**** does go extinct all the time, but humans have an, uhm, unique ability to cause extinction far more rapidly. We could wipe any or all species, including ourselves, off the face of this planet. You can't really say the same for any animal. Also, while we could debate the merits of saving any particular species, the general consensus seems to be that it would end up harming us in the long run, indirectly. One animal dies, allowing another to expand wildly, which then proceeds to wipe out another species/plant, said species/plant ends up being cure to cancer, we all look back on the event and go "wtf were we thinking?".

I strongly disagree. There are a FEW species that we could wipe out completely if we tried, but certainly not any or all. Not even most.



This sounds to me like what's been happening for millions (billions?) of years already.



This is kind of a stretch IMO. I mean, ****. There's a half a billion Albert Einstein reincarnate could-have-beens in a used condom in my garbage can. WTF was I thinking?

Since the rest hinges on the first point I'll just tackle that. I think your hangup there is you're assuming I'm talking selective extinction. Really, I mean glassing the planet level of extinction. Anything that survives wouldn't be alive for long (lack of food, clean water, oxygen, heat, etc).

Poor Tiger Woods.

I'd raise a ****ing tiger, it'd be metal as ****.

****.

To some extent I absolutely agree with most of the people here who don't understand why we're so married to all of the species on this planet, considering how many there have been and will probably be. On the other hand, we've seen how key species can make or break an ecosystem, and that we can upset equilibrium that also seem to keep us alive. Not to mention that, on a fundamental level, we are the only species with the cognizant capacity and the destructive force to be responsible for our actions. It's times like these where (I'm not being facetious) I begin to understand why religion is useful for providing a critical Father's eye to mortal doings. We should be held to a collective conscience even if one doesn't exist.