In a videoed podcast, Mike Tyson – puffing away on a spliff and clearly high to a certain extent – discussed what it was like to live with three tigers and then a mountain lion. His interviewers were also on cannabis.
He doesn’t like talking about himself because it makes him feel uneasy. And he says that he fell in love with pigeons at the age of nine. He also says that the sort of men who keep pigeons are gangsters in New York. And that applies to white and black guys.
He said that his cougar, which I presume he no longer owns, bit him because he was giving the cat a vaccination jab which clearly hurt and the cat retaliated. His wound required 6-7 stitches Tyson said. He was bitten by his dog no longer after. I think he was holding his mountain lion in a way that made it easy for the cat to bite him. Perhaps he jabbed in the wrong place. Why did he do it himself? Perhaps he couldn’t find a local vet or he felt that he was good enough with animals. I think he is very good with animals.
And his favourite cat is the mountain lion a.k.a. cougar because he finds this particular species of cat very attractive. He says the beauty is almost divine and he loves the green eyes although cougars don’t always have green eyes! In fact, he mentions their ‘green face’. That’s the cannabis talking!
They have a nice plain coat colour which he particularly likes. He mentions the brown merging into gray coat colour of the mountain lion.
I sense very much in this interview which you can see below on a YouTube video that he loves animals. And he expresses that love through possessing big cats which doesn’t surprise me because he’s the kind of character who would like to possess large and inherently dangerous animals.
One problem with looking after three tigers at his home without an enclosure (as I understand it), is that as soon as they jumped into the swimming pool, they went to the toilet so there was urine and faeces swimming around the pool! Not him. He wasn’t swimming around his beautiful backyard pool but tiger faeces and urine were. Was it a swimming pool or a pond? No idea.
And he was particularly partial to white Bengal tigers. This is a great shame because all the world’s white tigers are heavily inbred. No doubt Tyson managed to get his hands on white tigers that did not show this inbreeding in their deformed anatomy (yep, the inbreeding is that bad). But many of them do.
Tyson became well known for his love of animals and the fact that he kept big cats. This led people who were tired of looking after their own exotic pets, including big cats, to hand them over to Tyson as a kind of rescue service.
That’s the problem with exotic big cat pets and the pet medium-sized wild cat species. It’s a desire to possess this beauty and to gain some status from that but it wears off. It’s like buying a new car. After six months you become tired of it and want another new car which means you end up giving the dealership $4000 every time you change your car.
And it’s very similar to owning exotic big or medium-sized cats. After a while you tire of it. You love their beauty but you don’t love the fact that they scratch you and piss around the home and are noisy and keep you awake at night and try to escape all the time. And in the case of Tyson, they defecated and urinated in this swimming pool. There is always a problem. For me, it seems that the downside to owning these exotic large cat is greater than the upside. This is probably why nearly all of them end up in private or public zoos.
Fox News reports that he regrets owning tiger. He said ‘I was doing the wrong shit’. His story is in complete contrast to that of Taylor Swift and her domestic cats which she treats as babies. She’s made mistakes too in adopting a Scottish Fold. Bad choice as it is a breed that should not have been created.
P.S. Private zoos in America can no longer take in and possess big cats under the Big Cat Public Safety Act.
