why-animals-do-the-thing:

drferox:

datzoolife:

actuallyalivingsaint:

that-kid-from-the-internet:

ciarachimera:

rampaigehalseyface:

sparkingtimepiece:

petermorwood:

4gifs:

Tiger gets a bad baby tooth removed

When a tiger’s first response to having a tooth yanked is not a roar, snarl or swipe with claws, but a test nibble to check that its mouth works as well as it suddenly feels, it speaks volumes about how much the bad tooth* must have hurt.

*You can see, briefly, that it’s black and nasty on the inner side. Yuck.

poor baby

I’m just awed by the amount of trust in this gif. That tiger totally trusts that the human is going to help with that scary metal object on an already painful area and the human totally trusts that the tiger is just test nibbling and not chomping down on his arm. I flinch when a house cat comes at me too fast and these two don’t even hesitate to trust each other.

baby :3

I cannot explain my fondness for the words “test nibble”

“thank you human” *nibble nibble* ^_^

This just doesn’t seem right to me. @why-animals-do-the-thing @drferox

Initially I thought this was an odd slight of hand because look:

This tiger has a retained upper canine. See the two teeth coming out of the same socket next to his thumb? The adult tooth is the shorter one closer to the nose. The baby tooth needs to go, but that’s not something you can do with a yank.

This is the same sort of tooth from a dog patient. It’s just a poodle, but look how long the root (between the calipers) is compared to the crown you could see above the gum.

That’s at least what you can see outside the gum also being under the gum, and these are difficult to extract in their entirety. And initially I thought that’s what the guy in the gif was doing, or trying to do.

But he’s not touched the upper teeth at all.

He’s grabbing the baby lower canine, which is a bit grey and has bugger all root in this screenshot.

But there’s no blood there.

That’s a baby tooth that was ready to come out. This tiger would have to be only about 6 months old. It’s a kitten. That is a baby tooth that is meant to fall out, and usually it would on its own. This tiger is teething, that’s why it wants to chew everything.

That tooth probably would have come out with a good chew toy. It’s grey because the tooth is dead, just like when you lost your baby teeth. Ever swallow a tooth that you didn’t notice immediately as a kid? The tiger is likely to be in that little pain, judging by such a brief reaction.

It’s not even a really bad tooth. The tooth is dead, because it’s supposed to be, and supposed to fall out on its own.

I was waiting for @drferox to weigh in on this before I added my commentary, since we approach this type of media from different perspectives.

This video is from 2013, and the man who owns the tiger and is pulling the tooth is Michael Jamison. He’s a pretty infamous pet tiger guy from South Africa: if you’ve seen a tiger on a kitchen counter or in an enclosure with astroturf, it’s the same dude. This isn’t a cat in a professional management scenario, and that guy isn’t a vet. This is a pet owner who habitually shows off his exotic pets online and – for some reason – likes to repeatedly videotape himself pulling his tiger’s baby teeth out. There are actually three of these videos that I’ve found so far: two from 2013, which appear to be the same cat, and one that’s much more recent. 

I asked @drferox if it’s a good idea to remove teeth by hand when an animal is conscious, even if they’re about to fall out naturally, and unsurprisingly her response was no. It’s possible the tooth might break and you wouldn’t get all of it out, leaving shards below the animal’s gumline. Not to mention that if pulling the tooth hurts the animal you’re seeing them up for a really nasty experience – and potentially yourself for getting bitten or mauled. 

I also have to comment on how this video – like many others involving pet tigers – falsely portrays them as being “safe” to interact with; this one is egregiously bad because it shows a tiger tolerating something that most people know even domestic pets wouldn’t stand for. Content like this perpetuates the idea that these animals are not dangerous wild predators – and this video specifically also makes it seems like there is ever a “safe” or “appropriate” situation in which a wild animals can put it’s mouth on you. (When you’re raising any kind of animal, domestic or wild, to be around humans, it is crucial that you do not let them practice behaviors as babies you don’t want them to engage in as adults. With wild animals – like those hand-raised in zoos due to medical necessity, or as ambassador animals – one of those cardinal rules is that mouths do not go on people’s skin. Ever). 

So overall: not actually a cute video. It’s a trifecta of irresponsible husbandry practices, irresponsible animal management practices, and the perpetuation of dangerous misinformation about big cats.