http://www.theprovocation.net/

http://www.theprovocation.net/

 Law enforcement exterminated 49 exotic animals let loose just before the person caring for them, Terry W. Thompson, committed suicide. Law enforcement reportedly cornered and shot the animals, many of which were no more than 500 yards from their cages.

 This is a tragic case of "shoot first, ask questions later." Plenty of questions should have been asked.

Were any of these animals endangered species? (Yes, in fact some of them were.)
Were they a real and immediate threat to anyone?
Was there an alternative to simply killing them?

Much of the scrutiny since this tragic incident took place has focused on Thompson and whether he should have been caring for so many wild animals. That's an easy question to answer: He shouldn't have been. He had already been convicted of animal cruelty in 2005 and placed under house arrest for six months. Some of the animals on his property were housed in cages that had not been cleaned or were unsanitary. Others were malnourished. Yet he was allowed to keep them.

Maybe it's not a question of shooting first. Maybe it's a question of allowing the animals to be tortured and neglected first, and thenshooting them. That's what the state of Ohio did. The animals included 18 Bengal tigers, of which there are only 2,500 are left in the wild. And the lawmen of Zanesville, Ohio, just shot them. No questions asked. Along with 17 lions, eight bears and an assortment of other animals that had done nothing wrong except wander outside their cages when the door was left open. Most of the bears and big cats had been declawed, and had been bottle-fed.

Sheriff Matt Lutz put it this way: "I gave the order that, if the animals looked like they were going to get out, they were going down."

Going down? Who is this guy? Mike Tyson? Some gangsta rapper? These animals weren't "going down." The were being killed. And the media accounts are by no means clear as to how or why things transpired the way they did.

According to one account, officials felt they had to shoot the animals because they were concerned for public safety and police don't normally carry tranquilizer guns. According to another version, however, tranquilizer guns actually were an option. But in this account, police said they were told to shoot the animals instead for fear that they would wander away in the darkness, tranquilized, and wake up later to menace other people. However, even after the search operation was well under way, WBNS TV was reporting that officials would "try to use tranquilizers to save animals when possible."

Still another version reported that a veterinarian actually did shoot one 300-pound tiger in the neck with a tranquilizer dart. The animal then became agitated and approached the veterinarian.

It was killed.

But it turns out the tiger wasn't going after the veterinarian at all when it was shot. According to Lutz, it was trying to get away: "This thing just went crazy," he said. "It started to run into the wooded area, and our officers took it down."

What do those two sentences tell us? First, our friend the sheriff didn't regard the animal as a life to be preserved if at all possible, but a "thing." Second, the animal wasn't shot while charging at a veterinarian or even while moving toward a inhabited area. Instead it was retreating into the woods. What Lutz's officers did was the equivalent, in Old West terms, of shooting someone in the back - the ultimate act of cowardice. But somehow Lutz makes them sound like manly men by saying - the language more fitting for a gangsta rapper or a WWE pro wrestler - that his officers "took it down." It. Not him or her. To Lutz, this animal wasn't an individual belonging to a rare and vanishing species, but a thing. An "it."

(If Lutz wants to refer to tigers in terms usually reserved for inanimate objects, perhaps we should do him the same discourtesy. Henceforth, perhaps we should refer to Lutz using the decidedly impersonal pronoun "it.")

And Lutz wants us to believe his account of how things transpired when he's speaking the language of a wannabe big game hunter? Especially given all the conflicting accounts of what actually transpired? Not a chance. It's actually too bad we can't build a time machine and set it for a century ago. Lutz could go on safari in Africa with Teddy Roosevelt in a time before our species killed off thousands of other animals that are now endangered - or extinct - to make a profit and hang their heads over our living room mantles.

Were people really in immediate danger from these animals? If officers were really worried that the animals would be more dangerous tranquilized, shouldn't they have been even more worried that they would be dangerous if they were shot with live ammunition and wounded?

It should be pointed out that Zanesville itself is hardly a bustling metropolis. Once known as the pottery capital of the world, it's a largely rural area in east-central Ohio that's home to roughly 25,000 people. That's down from a peak of more than 40,000 in 1950. It's the largest city in Muskingum County, which says something about the rustic character of a city long past its heyday as an important center for textiles and manufacturing.

No one was in immediate danger of being attacked by any of the animals. Schools had been closed. The public had been warned to stay indoors. Signs were even posted on the highways. People with even just a bit more intelligence than the animals in question would have realized they'd be better off indoors. That would have given officials time to find some people with some knowledge and expertise in dealing with these situations on the scene.

It's not as though all this was happening in a vacuum; news that the animals had been let loose hit the national media hours before they were killed. When a major wildfire burns out of control, firefighters from across the region or even throughout the country are called to the scene. I'd be willing to bet that many animal experts who value the lives of big cats far more than Lutz and his posse did would have been all too willing to lend a hand.

People all over the world have lived around wild animals, some of them potentially dangerous, for millennia. Note the word "potentially." Most of the time, they avoid humans because they're rightfully more afraid of us than we are of them. People in the Western United States live in the foothills with mountain lions and bobcats (not to mention rattlesnakes) without going off and shooting them because they're "potentially" dangerous.

So go ahead and blame the late Terry Thompson for neglecting his animals. Blame the state of Ohio for leaving them in his care. They both deserve it. But don't absolve Sheriff Lutz and his posse-cum-safari hunters of their part in this tragedy. There were plenty of other options available to them. But they shot first. It's our responsibility to keep asking the questions that need to be asked. Because now it's later.