I really wish that was the worst injury this cat was at risk of in this situation, but unfortunately, there’s a lot of other ways this can go wrong. Tigers are very fast and very strong, and have flexible enough paws they can probably reach pretty far up the cat’s leg through that fence. That cat isn’t just a “fellow cat buddy” coming to hang out with the big boys, even though that’s how the photo “looks” - it’s a potential toy or prey item for those tigers. So there’s a couple options for what could happen here: the cat gets caught by the paw, dragged up to the fence, and loses the entire leg in a single bite; the cat gets caught by the paw, pulled to the fence, and suffers major lacerations to head / neck / abdomen as the tigers try to reach through and grab it; the cat gets grabbed and the tigers attempt to forcibly drag it into the enclosure through the mesh of the fence.
Think I’m kidding? I have colleagues who have seen big cats at their facilities grab unwary ducks and ground fowl who were foraging outside their enclosures and bodily pull them through the fence - sometimes even when the openings were as small as four inches square. It was never pretty, the animals never survived, and it always happened in the blink of an eye.
I know you’re frustrated with my response to this post, as well as the others you’ve commented on, because you feel like I’m taking all the fun out of what should be cute, unproblematic things on the internet. The thing is, the fact that people don’t recognize that a domestic cat being this close to those tigers is dangerous is exactly why I need to be that buzzkill voice. When the internet continually shows us content where people are wrestling tigers, or where tigers are living in houses and interacting with other animals, we’re conditioned to forget that they’re incredibly fast, powerful, mercurial predators who don’t give a damn that you’re just trying to be friendly.
The first thing you learn when you’re being trained to work professionally around big cats is that it is not safe to be close to the fence. They can and will hurt you through it - even if they’re just being curious or playful. You’re trained to never turn your back or be distracted when you’re at a fence line, and to always keep back at arms length from the fence whenever you don’t absolutely need to be close to it. When professional animal keepers do get that near a primary fence on a big cat enclosure - like for a training session - it’s with full knowledge of the potential risk involved, happens only after months of getting to know the behavior of the specific cat in the habitat, and generally involves a second trained staff member spotting them.
When people get close to big cat enclosure fencing, they get hurt. Look at what just happened last month in Arizona: a woman jumped the secondary safety fence, put her back to the primary fence to take a selfie with a jaguar, and ended up with long lacerations on her arms when the cat reached through and tagged her. If you look up photos of that exhibit, you’ll see the mesh of that fence isn’t much bigger than the mesh in this photo. That’s what happens when people get lucky - when the cats don’t try to pull them in through the fence. Last year, I analyzed all the recorded injuries and attacks on humans by big cats in the US since the year 2000. One of the most common types fence-line incidents was a big cat grabbing a finger or hand and yanking the person’s arm through the fence as far as it would go. It wasn’t very common for the people involved get all of whatever limb was grabbed back.
People are a lot bigger in proportion to the holes in a fence than that cat is. If large humans leave with mauled or missing limbs when tigers get ahold of them, what chance do you think a small domestic cat stands? Absolutely none.
While the tigers in that photo appear to simply be curious in the moment it was taken, there’s no way to predict what they might do the next second. That cat is in an incredibly dangerous situation, and as an educator who people trust to explain animal behavior accurately, it would be massively irresponsible to misrepresent that fact simply because the photo happens to look cute on first glance.
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