The big question about LSU’s Mike the Tiger lately has been: "Will he ever go to another football game?" Personally, I've always wondered: "What does he do all day?"
Dr. David Baker is Mike VI's personal veterinarian, and his answer to that is short and sweet. "He gets in his pool. He sleeps. And he defecates."
Dr. Baker's been the primary vet for Mike the Tiger for nineteen years, and he began attending to the late Mike 5. When he took the job he’d never worked with a tiger before. He had worked with cats, though - housecats.
"They are very much like house cats," he said. "In fact they're so similar that it does sometimes surprise me." If you've ever owned a cat, then you'll understand this. "Life is very much on their terms," he said, "meaning some days they're very interactive and affectionate, and other days they ignore you completely. (They're) very curious, very wary, they don't like new things. If anything is different in this enclosure he will recognize it within minutes."
That's true. When Mike approached us it was obvious that he knew who one of us was, and it wasn’t me. In fact, when I met Mike VI he made two sounds: a chuff and a moan. Chuffs are happy sounds. "What he was saying there was that he knows me and he was happy to see me," Dr. Baker said, "but he didn't know who that guy with me was. And he'll do that when strangers are close to him."
As a 2009 LSU grad, Mike is nothing new to me. But having Dr. Baker there revealed a side of Mike I've never seen before. "He likes to be scratched on the belly," he said, "like any guy I suppose."
Like house cats, tigers are good at masking health problems. Caring for tigers requires attention to detail making the job a 24/7 responsibility. As a result, tigers form bonds with their caretakers. Dr. Baker remembers when Mike VI first came to LSU.
“At that time everything in his life changed," he said. "He was in a new environment, he was by himself. He needed a friend and so he bonded very closely with me and with my two student caretakers. And so when they left, when they graduated, he was so upset at the turnover that he lost seventy pounds.”
Don’t worry, he gained it back. When Mike VI eats, he eats a lot, averaging 25-30 pounds of a prepared carnivore diet a day. On special occasions he gets a dead chicken or a pig, and his favorite snack is an ox tail. Dr. Baker showed me where Mike sleeps.
“This is his night house," Dr. Baker said while giving me a tour of the enclosure. "You can see that there’s a little food preparation area that we’re standing in, and his food gets thawed here in the refrigerator before it's fed to him. We feed him between four and six of those logs. They’re five pound logs.”
Mike's nighthouse has two holding cells, one for eating and one for sleeping. He sleeps on pine shavings and his bed is in the back corner next to a door. “And the trailer is on the other side of that door," Dr. Baker said. "So for him to load we just open that door and either he goes in or he doesn’t. You can see that it’s a fairly open area and there is no physical means of forcing him into the trailer. We wouldn’t do that even if we could. We don’t think that would be humane.”
Dr. Baker makes it clear that while Mike VI may have similarities to a house cat, he is a Bengal-Siberian tiger living in captivity. Happy and healthy is his objective. After all, he has bonded with the majestic feline.
“I want him to do whatever he wants to do," he said. "That’s all there is to it.”
Copyright 2015 WRKF
