This is what happens without reasonable regulations.
This pile of dead exotic animals, including 18 endangered Bengal tigers, could have just as well been a pile of dead people if these big cats had made their way into populated areas of Zanesville, Ohio yesterday.
Instead, the animals were shot by police -- a tragedy on top of a bigger and prolonged tragedy.
These animals were bought and held captive by a lunatic named Terry Thompson. There are no regulations in Ohio to prevent idiots like Thompson from purchasing wild animals.
This is the face of evil. This is Thompson.
It's hard to fault police for killing these animals. Thompson released the mammals and then committed suicide. The animals were on the loose and posed an immediate danger to the public. However, in a town where Thompson was well known by authorities, and where he had been arrested for allowing some of the dangerous animals to escape before, I do have to question as to why police did not have access to tranquilizers. Perhaps more animals could have been saved if bullets weren't the first and only option.
The legal and illegal exotic animal trade is an outrage. Wild animals belong in the wild, hopefully protected from poachers and other man-made threats. But what really has me steamed is this idea, constantly trumpeted from conservatives and Tea Partiers, that somehow we don't need any regulations regarding anything in this country. We don't need our food inspected. We don't need our drinking water protected. We don't even need air traffic control. There are people on the right who want to do away with government agencies that actually keep a lot of us alive.
In my opinion, we don't have enough regulations. Human beings are terribly flawed creatures that need some sort of boundaries and civilized protections against people like Thompson. That's why we have laws. Someone in an authoritative role must at least try to protect us from getting mowed down by a teenager speeding in their car while texting. We have to have someone in charge of making sure the medicine we're taking is relatively safe. And there should be safeguards that reduce the chance of someone unleashing dangerous animals on us.
Perhaps in a perfect world, where evil and stupidity weren't a part of the human condition, we wouldn't need rules or even religious leaders guiding us. Everyone would just do the right thing and not impose upon their neighbors or strip the planet of its most amazing creatures. But the more I see of people and the things they are capable of -- the misuse of freedom and power, the over-the-top sense of entitlement -- the more I think we are going to end up in a pile one day.
