Habari.

By now, if you haven’t heard about the great Ohio Tiger Shoot, you probably live in the cave they originally said belonged to Osama. Several dozen top-flight predators, previously incarcerated for life without parole on some jamoke’s farm, were cut free by him, only to be cut down by lethal fire from some local sheriff and his band of trigger-happy merry men.

Let’s not even talk about how this jamoke – previously accused of animal abuse – was allowed to house (a polite word) these beasts. But to gun them down – most of them still on the property – defies my deep affection for all things wild, excluding, of course, the bloodthirsty human heart.

Not that I delight in any human’s suffering (monetary or otherwise), but I was more than slightly amused to hear that one of the now-deceased Bengals took a “lion’s share” chomp out of its dead-by-suicide jailer’s hide, and that the last missing prisoner, an allegedly “diseased” monkey, was also probably snacked by one of the cats. Maybe so. But if you should live in the neighborhood, don’t go climbing any trees. I love horses, too. I ride them every Spring in the Altai Tavn Bogd, in northwest Mongolia. And still, I would’ve paid good money to see the jackass’s horses being chased by freed lions and tigers – something even the most demented screenwriter could not have dreamed, not in Ohio. No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture. Right…

This all brings to mind the chimp mommy, in yet another dumb human trick, who was killed by her “baby”, an adult chimp, but not before she stuck a desperate kitchen knife into the troglodyte (another bizarre movie moment), followed by it attacking the responding peace officer in his patrol unit, and eating her best friend’s face off. Needless to say, the chimp was sent “home” to his ancestors by police-issue handgun, and in countless other homes in our fine land, some dumbass, somewhere, is anthropomorphizing some wild animal, to potentially disastrous consequences. If you’re moronic enough to house an adult chimp, please feel free not to give it Prozac. The animal is depressed because it’s living with you! I know we share about 98% of our DNA with chimps – but just look what that 2% difference can do: everything from operas to iPhones.

The tiger shoot and this risible chimps-gone-bad story brings to mind a very entertaining flick I recently saw, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, starring my favorite Aron Ralston (“127 Hours”) impersonator, James Franco (no relation, I’m told). Besides being a very clever riff on a jailbreak movie, and having a thing or two to say (a bit dogmatically, I might add) about animal testing, especially on primates, it offers a telling throwaway moment early on.

Franco, playing a scientist with a heart of gold who has an epiphany that testing on chimps is bad, takes his placid, cutesy, secretly sequestered chimp “child” for a stroll on a leash in Muir Woods, of all places. The preposterously large troglodyte, taller on his hinds than Franco, sees another robust house pet on a leash, a gorgeous Shepherd, barking his head off at them. Chimp baby, in a delightful show of primate loyalty – and strength – turns on the doggie and SNARLS. No, really snarls. Tails go between legs, involuntary wet patches in undies ensue, and suddenly we get it: chimp baby, for all the cutesy anthropomorphism, is WILD.

The same pretty much goes for my dog, Chafu (“dirty” in Swahili; she loves to dig), a stout mix of Dalmatian and black Lab, and if you ask my neighbors and their dogs, some unidentifiable “fighting” breed. Not likely. She’s just pure dog. And if you ask Amy & me, the best dog in the world: the sweetest, lovingest, cuddliest, clowniest canine – indoors. But get her outside, where animals belong, and she’s – you guessed it – wild. Which is to say, an animal. She’ll insist on submission from other dogs less Alpha than she, and quickly submit to those moreso. She’ll defend the hearth from all intruders, including 400 lb black bears which I’ve seen her chase up a tree. More than once, fearlessly.

That’s what separates us, ultimately. For animals, when the gloves come off, they don’t know fear. They may not be dumb enough (like homo sapiens) to fight to the death, but when they do fight, they really know how to lean in. Not for blood, but for dominance. We lost that fine art, except perhaps in MMA, which at least allows the vanquished to “tap out” (submit) before the slaughter.

Well-trained as Chafu is, when I see the wild in her, I often wonder just how much domesticity she will tolerate, just how much she wants to run free. I’m ambivalent. If she broke out of jail like Franco’s chimp, never to return, and went on to lead an animal rebellion, of course we’d miss the hell out of her, but part of me would rejoice because deep inside I know she’s just on loan. A wild animal who entered into some unspoken compact with its doting feeders, on loan from some mythical forest where all the wild things are (thanks, Maurice Sendak!).

Which brings to mind another news moment, which if you missed, you’re probably living in the cave next to Osama’s: man returns to Zaire, seeking in the wild an orphan gorilla he helped raise and then released. Not knowing the result going in, I fully expected the man (or the gorilla) to die, but something far more heartwarming happened.

Which all goes to show that the bond we share with animals, whether “tame” or wild, transcends any label or cute outfits we can put on them. We share something primordial. They have been with us since the very beginning of our little jaunt on this planet (a mere several 100,000 years, if that, out of a total 5 billion). With us since we were acquiring crude tool making skills and speech. Our love for them lives in the depths of our oldest and most primitive Reptilian brain , and completes a part of us. As Romaine Gary said in his underrated novel about the elephant slaughter in Africa, for us, animals hold the Roots of Heaven.

But they are not us, and certainly not like us, and because of this, they should never be thought of as our “children”. Animals, especially Tier 1 predators, should never be kept in jail because they are, praises, wild at heart.

Here’s to you, lions and tigers. May your journey home be swift.