Facing Down a Starving Tiger

A tiger is a calm animal. Under the right circumstances anyway. At least in terms of it’s temperament a tiger is directed by it’s will to survive and protect its kill or cubs. The great British hunter, naturalist and author Jim Corbett studied this very ‘nature’ up close and personal and commented that, unless a tiger is wounded or has become a man-eater it will only object on occasion to a ‘too close an approach’. When this occurs the reaction of the tiger ‘takes the form of growling, and if this does not prove effective it is followed by short rushes accompanied by terrifying roars. If these warnings are disregarded, the blame for any injury inflicted rests entirely with the intruder.’

I once attended a live event at the now legendary Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo outside Brisbane. This was after Irwin’s own passing in a terrible ‘one-off; attack y a stingray in the ocean and yet the vibe of his love for gigantic, powerful animals and beats, from the sea or the land, was on full-display.

In the Crocoseum show I attended with my friend’s father, a local resident, who had wanted to visit for a decades (or for however long the zoo had been there) one of the sections featured a pair of fully-grown tigers interacting with their ‘Handlers’.

We were informed by loudspeaker that these tigers had been hand-reared by the handlers themselves so they trusted them.

It was, on reflection, really quite a remarkable show.

Of course, nowadays this type of ‘thing’ can easily be ‘searched up’ and seen on YouTube or in a  streaming documentary and yet, seeing it up close with my own eyes was really quite something. It was worth the rather long train journey and price of admission alone.

The tigers you see would instantly main or even kill somebody they didn’t know.

Not so calm after all perhaps and yet, like Corbett said, perhaps ‘someone they don’t know’ falls under the category of ‘too close and approach’ nevertheless (from the tiger’s own perspective).

In this article I’m going to liken a tiger to a drug dealer.

This is also a fictional story I have written called ‘The Girl Who Looked the Starving Tiger In His Eye’ in The Monkey In The Tunnel: 10 Stories About Active Addiction which is the first book from my Tales From The Fabrik Zone series of works about human compulsions set in the world of ‘Wet City’ and ‘The Wetlands’.

In some ways the whole world I dreamt up was influenced by incidents exactly like this day out to the Crocoseum. 

I mean it;s not every day that you do witness a pair of tigers play football with a couple of khaki-clad, smiling men who aren’t showing any fear whatsoever towards such potentially killer beasts.

Admittedly I went out of ‘irony’. I was expecting something rather cheesy with the whole zoo. After all I was a ‘cool, former art student’ in my own mind. Perhaps I was viewing the excursion itself the very same attitude I often adopted when coerced into watching reality TV with my wife.

‘Okay, I’ll watch it ironically’ I would tell myself.

Yet there was no denying it.

Irwin had created something really quite spectacular to behold.

Perhaps the fabricate, rather surreal atmosphere and my experience itself was akin to a life-long indie fan attending a boy band concert and enjoying the experience mightily despite their own internal protestations of the ‘commercial guff and slop’ he or she was witnessing.

In the story I created the character Claudia The Sad Junkie who awaits a enormous ‘tiger-form’ called Fabius The Fentanyl Dealer. 

Claudia has made her mind up to quit the ‘Sogpoppy’ (my own version of heroin or perhaps synthetic opioids - it’s a catch-all term for this type of substance in The Wetworld). Not only has she made her mind up but the day she will quit is today.

So she has summoned Fabius as the first sign of her ‘squaring up to reality’ and facing her demons and she knows ‘he will come anyway’ if she were to merely text him to say she’s finished with the Sogpoppy forever.

Basically she will have to confront him.

Simultaneously Fabius who suffers from Type 1 diabetes is contemplating his own situation. Although he has plenty of customers in the Wet City he is loathe to lose any for he has become the sole guardian of his cubs after murdering his tiger wife who was also a heroin addict and an unfit mother.

Yes, it’s quite a brutal story!

However, when confronting the very worst of human compulsiveness it may be necessary to entertain some rather, well ‘confronting’ themes and narratives.

The story revolves around Claudia’s own internal dialogue with herself about whether she is realistically going to be able to achieve her withdrawal attempt. 

The concept for the story came from a quote I read by Kristin Armstrong who is the most decorated female cyclist (or she was at the time of writing) with 3 Olympic gold medals to her name:

“We either live with intention or exist by default.”

Kriston has encapsulated in these words my own view of the process of gearing (please excuse the pun) up to face initial withdrawal. 

This could be ‘cold turkey’ withdrawal, attending rehab or using medication to come off the narcotics.

Whatever ‘way’ it is tackled the mindset must be to succeed.

In this sense ‘living by default’ could be very much related to the concept of ‘time-scales’ also.

For, whether we spend decades contemplating the nature of our drug usage or compulsive behaviours or we reflect on the damage and life-limiting nature of addiction for only one day (or even a few hours or minutes), ultimately our decision to quit and manage our lives clean will be based on simple intent.

In the story Fabius represents the ‘mightily challenging environment’ we all face whether addicted to dangerous substances or behaviours or, as it so happens, the ‘problems we inevitably face anyway when living our daily lives’ whether out of our minds or simply getting by clean and sober.

The human Fabius is like all of us (or most of us) - a survivor and a carer.

Even an ‘active junkie’ may care for his or her ‘Street Buddy’.

And, therefore Fabius is a ‘Good Man’, a ‘Good Tiger’ and displays his own morality.

The ‘problem’ for Fabius is that this is how he survives.

He can’t entertain the scenario of a junkie giving up and wrecking part of his income stream.

Basically it is the start of a slippery slope to Fabius and he tells this directly to Claudia when she boldly tells him of her intention to quit.

Without spelling out the whole story - otherwise I may struggle to sell copies of my book - the situation becomes one in which Fabius is going to prevail and Claudia realises her intention will only take her so far in reality.

Ultimately Fabius has a weakness - his diabetes - which Claudia is able to exploit.

The nature of the story is that it is impossible to hide from our own weakness and yet perhaps this very weakness itself contains within its lurking, terrible indecisiveness and inaction, the grains of what we actually require to overcome our life-limiting and life-destroying affliction.

After all the opposite word for ‘addiction’ is ‘indifference’.

How could we allow a tiger to attack us though when every fibre of our being in created specifically to avert us from this very situation in the first place?

Is addiction simply a form of anxiety?

Could addiction be ‘staring the tiger in his face and imaging he’s not real’?

After all if we’re not scared the tiger will play football with us.

If he knows us.

It;s quite a spectrum of possibilities isn’t it?

Either playing ball games with us and tickling us softly with his paw or tearing our face and neck apart with the same claws before munching down on our fleshy form.

Just like drugs.

Or compulsions.

When the gambler goes to put £100 on a horse he or she feels ‘elated’ for a while.

We feel a strong and powerful - perhaps an ‘all-consuming’ - sense of control.

As humans who are ‘cast adrift, surviving (most of the time), really quite alone in the world, this feelings is one of resplendent glamour and almighty euphoria. How can it not be?

And it’s very much to do with emotional instability if we’re really quite honest with ourselves.

The emotional anchored don’t carry out compulsive behaviours.

The ‘Tiger Handlers’ are confident.

I myself applauded them at the end not out of a sense of ‘joining in’ with the applause of the rest of the crowd or ‘applauding by rote’ as though this type of respect is ‘what you do’ at the end of any old show.

No these Handlers were literally that - Handlers.

But do they hold no fear or have no fear?

I’m not sure.

I was only a witness.

I could research the display more and find out plenty about ‘Tiger Handlers’ but I had learned enough that day for me personally.

Do I recommend the Crocoseum?

Well, like I said I more ‘happened upon it’ without expectation.

I didn’t know about it beforehand. There was no due-diligence or research on my part. It was a ‘happy accident’ for me that I witnessed it.

And, like I said, it was well worth the money and time spent.

We can and do ‘learn something every day’ and on that day I learned that we simply need to hold our fear in our heart, transfer our perhaps newly-manifested-through-new-found-intention-based confidence outwards to the surface and accept the danger which is forever in our environment if we are to succeed.

In the end the tigers and The Handlers all had a  great time as did the crowd.

What if it had gone wrong?

There were plenty of children in the Crocoseum that day.

And, to be honest, sometimes, like with Irwin himself when he was playing with the stingray on that fateful day, things can and do go wrong.

Still I’m almost certain Irwin would not blame the stingray who killed him.

If the tigers had become irked, perhaps by an unexpected flyover by a military jet the Australian government had decided to fly that afternoon, then whatever happened would have happened anyway.

Let’s face it – if one takes on the job of ‘Tiger Handler’ anything could happen.

And, like a ‘Heroin Addict’ quitting and perhaps becoming a ‘Hillwalker’, after some time, the Handlers knew deep down, and also ‘on the surface’ that, in all likelihood, the tiger’s nature, on the whole is actually very good.

So, if you are a ‘Junkie’, an ‘Alcy’, an ‘Addict of Anything At All’, a ‘Compulsive Behaviour Specialist’, you suffer from ‘Very Bad Habits’ or you just keep having a ‘Collection of Silly, Unhelpful Thoughts. remember how you can interact with a tiger.

The journey is embryonic in reality so we must start with a ‘Proto Tiger’ if that is what we must do.

We get to know it – him or her, our little ‘Tiger Cub’ – and we grow with it and learn our anxiety is simply in our imagination even if it is also good to hold within us genuine fear.

Life is scary but that’s no bad thing.

When holding the needle full of poppy to our vein we stare the tiger in the face.

Whatever we feel perhaps it’s time to start confronting the day when we don’t any longer need to disregard the warning coming from within.