[Mexico City, December 9. Image via Getty]

A little girl looks at a member of animal rights organization AnimaNaturalis is seen inside a cage painted as a tiger during a protest against the consumption of animal-based products on December 9, 2009 in Mexico City. AFP PHOTO/Luis Acosta (Photo credit should read LUIS ACOSTA/AFP/Getty Images)

[Jakarta, August 13. Image via Getty]

ProFauna activists hold a demonstration in Jakarta on August 13, 2009 demanding the government to stop tiger and elephant trade and punish the perpetrators. Indonesia has failed to stop poaching of endangered Sumatran tigers, with body parts of the big cats going for sale at retail outlets on the island they call home, a wildlife group warned. The Sumatran tiger population is estimated at around 400 to 500. Poaching as well as deforestation to make way for pulp, paper and palm oil plantations are the main factors behind the animal's decline. TOPSHOTS AFP PHOTO/Bay ISMOYO (Photo credit should read BAY ISMOYO/AFP/Getty Images)

[Image via AP.]

"A Swiss zoo on Friday rejected suggestions that a baby hippopotamus could be killed and fed to the big cats because of lack of space…"

Baby Hippo Won't Be Fed To Tigers, Zoo Says [MSNBC]
Swiss Zoo Has One Too Many Hippos, So Little Farasi May Have to Go [WSJ]

A farm worker holds a piglet and two of the three tiger cubs abandoned by their mother last week at a zoo in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2008. A pig at a farm in eastern Ukraine agreed to nurse the three little tigers together with a dozen of its own piglets. — AP

[Image via AP.]

In closing the zoo, do the Chinese know something we don't? (Says Moe: "Um, yes, that any excuse is a good one if it helps you clear away more land for the upcoming Genocide Olympics!"). But what they did brings up an important point: Is there a compelling reason for zoos to even exist? (And don't get me started on circuses.) Any future human or alien civilization stumbling upon the relics of our contemporary society would find a sorry, schizophrenic situation: A world that both fetishizes animals — Polar bear pajamas! Animal Planet! Four-hundred-dollar Louis Vuitton dog collars! — and is complicit in their forced captivity, unyielding agony and politically-sanctioned dominion. (Apparently, to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate you must also murder creatures on-camera.)

In my mind at least, the question is not how or why Tatiana the tiger killed one and wounded two others, it's how or why we got to a place where animals like her are held captive for the amusement of others. It's why we even fucking question the "uglier" impulse(s) of wild animals like tigers in the first place. (55 percent of voters on CNN's website believe Tatiana should have been tranquilized, not shot and killed. Plus, as any cat owner knows, even human-friendly felines retain a feral aspect that is impossible to domesticate away.)

Zoos always created a profound sense of unease in me, even as a child, but the last straw, so to speak, came in 2001, when I visited New York's Bronx Zoo with a close friend and his young son for its annual, Christmas-themed "Holiday Lights" extravaganza. Bundled up in down jackets and woolly hats and gloves, we shuffled around the grounds, gawking at and chattering over the colored lights, the squawking sea lions, the playful monkeys. At the elephant exhibit, however, the three of us quickly grew quiet: Three of the zoo's pachyderms stood motionless within a cavernous enclosure, their eyes vacant, as if signaling some sort of deep and profound depression even the most pharmaceutically-medicated of us could not fully comprehend. The sheer absurdity and cruelty of the situation hit me like a ton of bricks: A trio of the world's most glorious creatures held captive in a crude, concrete enclosure many oceans away from where they belonged. (It was no surprise when, a few years later, one of the zoo's elephants died a premature death and zoo directors announced that the elephant exhibit would be closed.) We realized that we were the real animals, and left the zoo immediately afterwards, never to return.

Victims May Have Dangled Leg Over Tiger's Moat, Says Report [CNN]
China Closes Zoo After Tiger Beheaded [MSNBC]

Related: All Too Often, Not So Fun: Zoos And Animal Exhibits [Humane Society of the United States]
Man Dead In Circus Elephant Enclosure [Sydney Morning Herald]
Dominion: The Power Of Man, The Suffering Of Animals, And The Call To Mercy [Amazon]
An Elephant Crackup? [NY Times]
Bronx Zoo Plans To End Elephant Exhibit [NY Times]
The Ivory War [60 Minutes/CBS News]
Blake's 'Tyger' [Harpers]
Tiger Study [World Wildlife Fund]

Tatiana mauled two others, now in stable condition. Last December, Tiger Tat ate the flesh off a zookeepers arm during a public feeding. The terrible tigress didn't survive the holiday — she was shot by police.

And speaking of dead animals, luxury purchases were a bright spot on the otherwise gloomy holiday sales front, rising 7.1 percent, "as the well-heeled splurged on $600 Marc Jacobs trench coats and $800 Christian Louboutin shoes." How nice for them.

Racy Santa Cited for DUI [UPI]
Investigators probe killer tiger's escape at zoo [CNN]
Holiday Spending Is Weak, as Retailers Expected [NYT]