How a dead Quarter Horse is affecting the Arabian Horse

   In the early 80’s, a strange disease appeared in American horses. In mild cases, it appeared to be ‘tying up’, where the muscles would rhythmically pulse or completely freeze in paralysis. In more severe cases, though, the horse appeared to have problems breathing and in some severe cases literally drop dead of what appeared to be heart attack.

   The number of cases grew. Veterinarians were baffled. This wasn’t tying up; it wasn’t colic, what was this? Vet schools began doing the footwork and discovered it was new:

HYPP, Hyperkalemic Periodic Paralysis.

    Hyperkalemic periodic paralysis is a genetic disorder that causes horses to have episodes of muscle spasms, weakness, “dog sitting” due to hind quarter weakness, collapse, recumbency, sweating, high serum potassium levels, third eyelid twitching and yawning. Levels of distress during an attack vary, with some horses showing only mild symptoms, while others have very severe symptoms. Due to respiratory paralysis or respiratory failure during an attack, some horses can suffocate and die.

hypp-and-the-impressive-line-of-americhttp://www.tsln.com/news/an-quarter-horses-the-facts/

  Horse breeders began to do their pedigree homework.  It became apparent that it was confined to Quarter Horses. Then it narrowed down to show horses.  Horses bred by live cover or artificial insemination, and finally, horses sired by one single stallion: “Impressive”.

AQHA stallion "Impressive"

   “Impressive” was a chestnut Quarter Horse stallion of superstar stature. He’d been raced very lightly but then was retired due to laminitis. His owners then campaigned him as a halter horse.

   Halter horses don’t actually DO anything. They are shown solely for looks. Indeed, in 1974, at the age of 6, Impressive was crowned National Champion Halter Horse with only 48 halter points. This is akin to being made President of the United States with only a double handful of votes.

       

    Impressive was to Quarter Horse halter horse breeders what Elvis Presley was to country music: a king. Much of this was due to expert marketing, a lot of behind the arena politicizing, and glitzy advertising. Impressive wasn’t just a living breathing equine, he was a highly profitable industry. One that his owners very jealously protected in the way of intellectual property as well as biological.  

   He was sold several times.

   Each time Impressive was resold, his price rose quickly; at one point, an offer of $300,000 for him was refused by Brown, who said "ain't nobody in this world got enough money to buy this horse."  

From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressive_(horse)

  He won every  halter class he was aimed at. I suspect that in some cases, especially as his fame grew, he won due to intimidation-or outright bribery-of supposedly impartial judges. It’s pretty hard to say no to a cocksure man backed by a pack of pit bull lawyers  and a lot of money in his hand.

   Everyone wanted an Impressive foal. If you could afford it, you could have one, just by paying an astronomical price for his semen. At his peak, he was commanding an enormous (by QH standards) stud fee of $25,000.

  Despite the high price, he produced over 2200 foals. 

 However, many of these foals went on to develop HYPP. In most cases they were rendered useless as riding horses (either through the deleterious effects of HYPP or the sloping back he passed on just as faithfully). Many died outright.  

  When people began to accuse the stallion of being the source of HYPP, the Impressive teams (because by now there were a lot of Impressive get owners all on the Big Money wagon)  went into action. They took the then unprecedented  step of attacking, in print, in person and in court, anyone who had the temerity to blame Impressive. It was “slander”. It was “libel”. It was “malicious and willful attempts to cause them loss of income.”

   These days it is common for Big Money to successfully trample  the little man’s First Amendment  rights if the truth threatens their bottom line, but then it was unheard of.  

   They succeeded. If they didn’t put you out of business, your reputation and that of your horse was destroyed. They virtually gagged you if you even hinted that their stallion was to blame.

   A teenager at the time, I was working at a small Quarter Horse breeding farm. “Our” stallion had not a drop of Impressive bloodlines.  We had no idea at the time what was going on but we definitely were aware of the poisonous atmosphere the Impressive folks deployed.  

  I didn’t like Impressive for two reasons. 

  One, his back sloped deeply to the front. Indeed, there was such an obvious truncation just behind the withers I wondered how a saddle would fit on his back.

  That was my first lesson in Big Money Show Horses.  It didn’t matter that the horse couldn’t carry a saddle.  The fashion in the QH halter ring was for big muscled butts and tiny feet. 
Indeed, ‘our’ stallion stood at just over 15 hands, weighed 1200 lbs. and had 00 feet. Yes.

 Further, many of his  equally tiny hoofed get developed navicular or laminitis within five years of foaling. In the time I worked there, I only saw the stallion ridden once. Most of their horses were not broken to saddle and even the foals weren’t halter broken until they had a definite buyer for the foal.  They were breeding for halter horses, not riding horses. That’s precisely what they got: big butted horses with tiny feet that foundered with depressing regularity. 

   It didn’t matter to the Halter crowd.  Halter horse breeders weren’t breeding for RIDING horses. No, they were breeding for pretty HALTER horses. Halter horses that were, in many cases, no more usable than a Breyer model. (But  were far more expensive).

    My second lesson was how vengeful-and merciless-Big Money can be when it’s threatened or called to task.

    I went to one Quarter Horse Congress with ‘my’ barn. Being just another muck booted teenaged girl, I was ignored. Thus I was able to overhear whispered warnings in the show barns:  don’t dare say the words HYPP and Impressive in the same sentence. The Impressive Mafia was mingling in the crowds and made it known that such ‘slander’ would be aggressively punished. 

   In 1992, the geneticists at UC Davis proved the breeders were right.

   Impressive WAS the sole source of HYPP. 

   Bless their scientific souls, those scientists didn’t give a shit how much money Impressive’s owners had. Nor were they bothered by threats of litigation. Science had proven that one single stallion-Impressive- had a dominant mutation for HYPP that he passed on to every single one of his foals.

      Impressive’s team was beaten. But did they apologize? Did they compensate their victims for court costs, not to mention Loss of Business? Not to mention the loss of horses?

   Oh, hell, no. In fact, they had set an ugly precedent in the courtrooms.

   In the meantime there were THOUSANDS of Quarter Horses bearing the mutation.

   Most QH breeders swore off anything to do with Impressive. The Registry went even further, despite furious pushback from Impressive, Inc.

 “After a number of years of debate, effective since January 1, 2007, the AQHA amended rule 205(c)(3) and rule Rule 227(e) to require all descendants of Impressive to be tested prior to being registered, and ban from registration all horses born after January 1, 2007 with HYPP genetics confirmed by DNA testing to be homozygous for the condition (H/H).

Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressive_(horse)

  This does not mean that the disease has been flushed from the population of Quarter Horses in the US. Far from it.

     Some breeders don’t give a damn, preferring to make a buck rather than be responsible. (Notice the rule is the horse with Impressive genes  is ‘banned from registration’, NOT banned from breeding.)

    Also, in those years between Impressive’s reign and today, a huge industry in ‘Paint” horses has engulfed the horse industry in the US.  “Paints” (the name is copyrighted and registered) are Quarter Horses with pinto coloration.

We in the US are awash in “Paints” and have been for at least two decades.

If you go to Dream Horse you will see the majority of horses for sale are Paints or Paint crosses. They are everywhere. Most of them have ‘issues’. Not  just with feet, backs, and HYPP, but also with color related problems, such as Lethal White Syndrome. I have yet to meet a paint who hasn’t had scratches, or sunburn, or ‘flicks’,a  head tossing syndrome involving overactive  and often painful trigeminal nerves.

   Also, many Appaloosa breeders fold QH breeding into their breeding programs. They want the big butts, small feet and hope for the spots to come through that often don’t.  My first leased horse, Hank, was 7/8 QH and 1/8^th Appaloosa. He had no spots but did have navicular and muscle issues.  I didn’t have him long enough to know if he had HYPP, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. However, the Appaloosa registry (ApHA) also banned Impressive blood from being registered in 2008.

   The point, though is that the AQHA Registry (despite vociferous court battles from Impressive’s syndicate) FINALLY took steps to begin to eliminate the mutation from the Quarter Horse breed.  But it took lawyers, money and years of legal wrangling to force the breeders into what should have been a moral and ethical decision.

      However, today is a different climate. Now Big Money knows that favorable legal decisions can be purchased.  Sometimes all it takes is ‘binding arbitration” (a kangaroo court procedure that never, ever finds in the favor of the little man). Usually, though it entails keeping several lawyers employed who drag the defendant into court for decades until the little guy runs out of money, patience, hope and finally submits to the inevitable despite it not being just. Judges, especially Supreme Court ones, can be purchased and trusted to rule the way Big Money desires. Legal decisions  can be purchased. Justice for the little man is extinct.

   So how is it that a dead Quarter Horse can affect Arabian horses?

   There is a newly elucidated disease called “Lavender Foal Syndrome.” It afflicts Egyptian Arabians.

Below is the link to a report on the disease. There is a video that is disturbing to watch, but it is important for someone wanting to breed his mare see it. 

http://blackburngen677s13.weebly.com/

  

Foals with LFS display several neurologic symptoms. These include [1]:

    Tetanic-like seizures

    Stiff or paddling leg movements

    Involuntary eye movements

    hyperextension of the head or neck [1]

These neurologic symptoms result in the foal being unable to stand or nurse and are always fatal [1]. Affected foals are usually humanly euthanized a few days after birth. Foals with the disorder also have a diluted coat color sometimes described as silver, pewter, pale gray or lavender, resulting in the name of the disorder, "Lavender Foal Syndrome" [1]. LFS can be difficult to diagnose immediately as its symptoms are very similar to several other neonatal conditions including encephalitis and neonatal maladjustment syndrome [2]. 

It is a mutation, a genetic disease much like Lethal White Syndrome is to Paints.  A foal born with Lavender  Foal Syndrome is definitely lavender colored. They don’t live very long.  Almost immediately upon being foaled, they demonstrate distressing actions: tetany, (meaning actions as if the horse has tetanus), spasms like those caused by strychnine, etc. Afflicted foals cannot stand and must be euthanized. It is obvious that the foal with the disease is in pain, not to mention fear.

   The disease is caused by a recessive gene. This means a horse could be a carrier but not show any symptoms of the disease. However, if a carrier is mated to another carrier, the resulting foal will have LFS and die. It is lethal. It is painful. It is incurable.

  The disease, so far, has been traced to six Egyptian Arabian stallions, and, possibly, one Crabbet Arabian in Australia.

   What are their names? Who owns them?

   You will not find out. The owners of the stallions are keeping the identity SECRET.  

Go ahead, go surfing. You’ll learn a lot about the disease itself but not who the responsible stallions are.

   This is the lessons they learned from Impressive.

   

   Rather than be honest with a mare owner, they will NOT reveal that their stallion carries the LFS mutation.  The ‘official’ explanation is that they don’t want their stallion’s reputation tarnished. They want to ‘avoid the stigma’ the disease brings.

  That’s bullshit.

 

  What it is all about is the money.

  

   They don’t want to lose money. They are in the business of breeding horses. Being ethical has no place in their mission. They don’t CARE about YOUR business, just your checkbook. A stallion takes a few minutes to breed a mare. It takes a little longer to inseminate a mare artificially. The mare takes 11 months to grow the foal, and in that time, can’t be bred to another stallion.  They don’t give a shit about that. They want their stud fee now and devil take the hindmost.

    The owners of these stallions are no different than the scum ball with an STD who gets your daughter pregnant and then skips town.  

 They look at their bottom line, not the life or death of a foal, and certainly they don’t give a damn about anyone else in the business.

  They want everyone who is breeding Arabians to shoulder the cost of testing every horse they own, rather than say, I am sorry but I cannot ethically continue breeding this stallion.

  Stigma? You bet. But it’s not the stigma of having a stallion with a mutation. That's not something we have any control over. It's evolution in action. Shit happens with horses. We all know that.

The stigma they should consider very carefully is the one they will gain when the identities of the stallions leaks out-which it will, eventually. That knowledge-that the owners are fully aware that their stallion has this mutation but is still willing to take money from a person to breed his or her mare to that horse, without  explicitly admitting that the stallion carries this disease, will do more damage to their business than any  money they make in  stud fees. They are committing a criminal act. It is a CRIME.

And should be treated as such.

Clean your grooming tools!

   Last month I was pleased to be asked to accompany a woman to look at a dressage horse. She'd been shopping for some time. She wanted my unbiased opinion, something that just amazes me that she trusts my judgement...but I've been working on horses for many years.  She knew what she wanted: a warmblood, preferably a mare (no, I don't get that, but then, mares and I don't always see eye to eye) and within a certain price range. Said price range was, to me, in the nose bleed section, high enough that I could probably have bought a brand new fully tricked out pickup truck. 

   Road trips with horse people are ALWAYS fun. This one was no exception. It took several hours of driving to get to a lovely barn with lush paddocks full of gorgeous horses, some   with exuberant babies at foot. The drive to the barn was lined with oak and maple trees. The gate opened itself, and had a large wrought iron silhouette of a dressage horse on it. I am betting you can envision it. It was, without a doubt, a rich woman's barn.

   The owner said, oh, I'll have my help bring Mare out of her paddock and you can try her out. 
   She did. Mare was very nice but was covered in dried mud, as we'd had rain earlier that day and she'd taken full advantage of rolling in the resulting mud. Like my own Raven, Mare had the knack of getting mud EVERYWHERE, to include between her ears and an inch thick on her very lovely rump. But...I don't mind cleaning up a muddy horse. Rolling (when it's not in reaction to colic) is good for a horse.  When they roll, it's to get the kinks out of their back after standing in a stall all night. The mud cakes onto their hide and forestalls the flies, which, in late August, are numerous as the swallows have all left, preparing for migration.

I have trained Raven to roll on command, by the way. I'd rather see him roll when I can choose where (like inside a nice, clean arena) rather than in the mud hole in his paddock.

Mare wasn't a dirty horse from neglect. She was just a dirty horse from being outside, like horses should be.

    What shocked me, though, was the owner's grooming kit. Her barn was immaculate and beautifully appointed. She was walking about in riding boots that probably would have cost me a month's pay. She was a professional who could afford to hire people to do the manual work. Her fences, her horse trailer, her very appearance, was spotless. She's a pro in the horse breeding and showing world. And, to be honest, despite her obvious wealth, there isn't a bit of snob in her. But her grooming kit looked as if it'd been thrown out after ten years of scrubbing cars at the local High School fund raising car wash. 

    I am old fashioned. I prefer flat leather tack on my horses, no ''''bling''' (gads I hate that term) on me, or my horse, and I want natural fiber brushes. 

   The Owner of Mare's grooming kit had two plastic brushes with bristles so worn down I am amazed they actually touched the horse. They were FILTHY. One appeared to have been red and white at one time but you couldn't tell for sure. 
    Her rubber curry combs were worn to nubbins. And she knocked the big chunks off the horse using a METAL curry comb.

    Aggghhhhhh! But I said NOTHING. It was not my place to say anything. Still, I wanted so badly to snatch the nasty brushes and the metal curry out of her hands and say what are you, crazy???

   I learned to groom a horse from two people. The first was from the horse care books written by a wonderful author named  Margaret Cabell Self. The second was a cantankerous Irishman, a man who trained Thoroughbreds at the local race track, who hired me to walk 'hots' (at the age of 16, and much to the fury of my father). A 'hot', by the way, was a Thoroughbred who had just come off the track after a work or a race. One walked the horse cool. Now they use a 'hot walker' machine.
  Mr. Kelly, who'd grown up at tracks in Ireland and then moved to the US, taught me how to properly groom a horse, so well that to this day, I am the woman my friends want when it comes to bathing their horses for a test or a show. I'm NOT a show groom. My attempts at braiding a horse's mane are so poor that the horse is too embarrassed to come out of his stall. But I damn well can put a shine on a horse that will knock your socks off. 

  When I saw the woman's grooming kit, I had to bite my tongue.
  Must. Keep. Opinions. To. Myself. I thought, keeping my mouth firmly shut.  The horse is in excellent health and is well kept, what her grooming kit looks like is none of my business.
But I strained the hell out of my self control.

I wondered. How could the woman not SEE how bad her tools were? But maybe it's, well, she sees them every day. She doesn't think, she's grooming a horse and thinking of what she's going to do next. Maybe someone else does the grooming for her at a test. But maybe, too, it is a case where no one taught her how to groom a horse. One just...does it, you know? Maybe they teach it in Pony Club, but I don't know. But no one, it seems, thinks of how to properly groom a horse, and even fewer give any thought about cleaning their tools.

So I will do a quick instruction.

Rule number one, as Mr. Kelly so succinctly (and without his almost unintelligible brogue) told me, metal does NOT touch a horse's skin. The metal curry comb is to clean the BRUSH, not the horse. 

 

Metal curry comb cleans the BRUSH, not the horse.

So: Take one dirty horse. 
Take up your rubber curry comb. It is used to scrub against the grain of the hair in order to bring up dust, scurf, dandruff and 'knock the big chunks' off. Test to see how much pressure your horse wants. My Arab, Jordan, wanted a hard scrub. Raven, a warmblood, will tell you in no uncertain terms that you are scrubbing too hard!

Every once in a while, depending on the style of the curry and the amount of hair and dirt coming off the horse, knock the curry on the floor to dislodge the detritus. Mr. Kelly insisted on one knocking the curry in a row, so he could COUNT the piles of dirt to see if you were actually grooming the horse to his high standards.
Once you have done the entire horse, to include the heel bulbs! one takes up one's dandy brush.  Again, I prefer natural fibers, but they are going the way of the dodo, I am sorry to say. If yours is plastic, it's okay. 

Brush with the grain, starting at the poll and working one's way down the horse, top to bottom. Groom in horizontal 'bands', flicking the dirt down onto the band below your brush's length. End up at the belly. Brush down the legs, getting into the gaps between the tendons but be gentle.  End each stroke with a flick of the wrist to 'toss' the big chunks of dirt off the horse and onto you.  Every two or three strokes with the dandy brush, swipe it clean with the metal curry comb. (You may be different, I use both hands, the dandy brush in my left hand and the metal curry in my right when I'm working on the left side of the horse, and vice versa on the right.) Go over the entire horse. In some spots where the mud is an inch thick, keep currying/brushing until it comes clean.

Some folks brush the mane and tail. I know one person who doesn't touch a brush to her warmbloods' tail, merely sprays it with a detangler and pick out the grass, etc with her fingers. I use a human hairbrush on Raven's mane and forelock but not his tail, for that, I use detangler, too. If you don't mind split ends, use a mane comb, but I won't. Sorry. They're too damaging. 

I don't curry a horse's face. I gently brush it, covering each eye with one hand in order to keep dust and dirt out of it, as well as preventing inadvertently hitting him with it.
Scrub the hooves, if they're muddy, with a plastic scrub brush (remember this tool, as it has a part to play later) and pick out the feet with a hoof pick. 
 

Plastic scrub brush for cleaning hooves, and, when clean, scrubbing grooming tools.

If you want, then go over the entire horse again with a 'body' brush. In my case, it is a soft brush made of horse hair, but again, there are synthetic fiber ones that are soft enough for the purpose. The body brush gets the fine stuff that the coarser fibered dandy brush doesn't dislodge. 

If I'm feeling extravagant, I then take a microfiber cloth over the entire horse (save mane and tail and hooves) to put a shine on him.

Now: Let's clean your tools.

You don't need to clean them every time, unless they're plastic. Natural fiber brushes can take cleaning but you don't want to over do it, unless you don't mind buying new ones ever few months.

You will need:
A bucket, filled with hot water, a capful or two of bleach, and a glop of  soap such as Murphy's oil soap.  Make it all sudsy. 
Rubber gloves for you.
A hose with a sprayer on it. 
A CLEAN plastic scrub brush.
A work spot where you don't mind water puddling up.
A nice hot day with sunshine, or, if it's raining or winter, a heated room.

Ready?
Separate all your tools. Brushes in one pile, currys in another, and everything else in a third.
Take your plastic brush in one gloved hand and the finest fibered brush..in my case, the horse haired body brush, in the other. 
Sploosh the body brush in the hot, soapy water. Get it good and wet. Brush the fibers with the CLEAN plastic scrub brush.


Place it aside. Take the dandy brushes and clean them the same way: swooshing them in the hot soapy water, scrubbing with the plastic scrub brush, setting them aside.

Place your rubber curry combs in the hot water. Using the plastic scrub brush, scrub the curry with the plastic brush UNDER the water. Unless, of course, you want to spray bleachy water all over your jeans.
Place them aside.

 One type of curry comb is oval (it's the blue one in the picture.). It collects hair very well but is a booger to clean. I use a knife or a hoof pick to clean all the hair out, but I recently discovered that a vacuum cleaner does a great job of sucking all the hair out. Scrub under water with the plastic scrub brush. 
 

From left: body brush (synthetic fiber), dandy brush (natural fiber), body brush (horse hair), a second dandy brush, natural fiber, and the blue plastic curry comb which I don't know what it's officially termed. These brushes have been rinsed and put out in the sun to dry.

Clean your other tools: sweat scraper, hoof picks, etc in the now pretty dirty water.

Now, with the hose, start 'rinsing' the brushes and other tools. Get the spray to the roots of the brush fibers but don't soak the hell out of them, just enough to get all the soap out. The plastic curry combs rinse in a minute.

From left: rubber curry combs, hoof picks, a wooden pasta fork, aluminum sweat scraper, hoof picks, human hair brush for mane and forelock. 

Set everything out in the hot sun to dry. When you first set out a fiber brush, set it handle side UP to let the water drain, but don't let it sit this way for long, as it will deform the bristles (if they're natural fiber.) Then turn them bristle side up, in the wind and the sunshine, and let them sit for several hours, or until nice and dry.

Vacuum out your kit itself, or if it's plastic, hose it out, turn it up to drain and dry, and you are done. 
Now you have nice clean grooming tools. 

If you wonder why I have a wooden pasta fork in with the picture, I made a post years ago about how I use one on my horses to do 'social grooming'. It's more to make the horse happy than any real grooming use, and I should dig out that post and re run it. But it may be too, that from a blog I no longer have, so I might just have to re-write it. Oh darn. 

How do you get the horse to STOP?

     Maybe I shouldn't complain. 

     There are many folks out there who have horses that just LOVE to stop. And stay stopped. Especially with very green riders, the horse will take one look and say, "She's got nothing on me, I will just stand here." Then it becomes a dance between rider and trainer: kick him! Keep him going!"

    Raven is just the opposite. He has an enviable work ethic. He LIKES to work. He wants to work. Sue is out of town and has our barnlord riding him daily, because I am often unable to come out to the barn on a daily basis. Keeping him fit and happy is what we want, and he is more than happy to oblige. He hates 'dope-on-a-rope' (lunging) but get on his back and he's okay let's get to work.

  That's the problem I am having. I am bareback, as usual, and usually don't even have the reins in my hands. He's become very happy with working in a low, relaxed frame with little if any contact,  and I don't need the reins to get him to go.

   I need him to STOP. And he doesn't.  

  How do I get him to STOP?  Say "Whoa?" He doesn't respond to 'whoa'..he's a dressage horse. I use my seat to turn him, to sidepass, serpentine, no problems. But getting him to come to a stop is proving beyond me. I do NOT want to use the reins. Reins are for steering, not halting. Believe it or not, there is not much in my numerous 'how to ride' books that say how to halt. Go, yes. Jump, yes. Canter, passage (no way in hell am I at that level but my books can tell me) but Halt? Maybe all the authors had horses that had plenty of whoa in them, because seldom is it addressed.

   I fiddle around with my seatbones and the times he does halt, it's a half hearted one. It's not a crisp clean halt, it's more a dribbling series of slower steps until he finally comes to a halt. In the meantime I'm wondering, did he stop for me or because I said something with my seat just for a nanosecond that communicated what I wanted? If so, which was it? Engaging my core? Exhaling, inhaling, squeezing with my calves, shoving my seat bones backwards? Sitting tall, leaning back, doing everything I can think of save yanking back on the reins?

  So I try to replicate what I did. It worked five seconds ago. This time he ignores it. Arrgh. 
I have often said he is a stern teacher and in this case he's almost stone deaf to my requests, and I cannot figure out how to ask. 

  Oh, I hear some folks: do a half halt. Well, there are as many definitions for how to do a half halt as there are horses and riders. I don't think anyone really knows how to define a half halt in terms my simple mind can comprehend, never mind telling me how to do it.  And how do I know I've actually done one?  What differentiates a half halt and a full halt? If his slowly coming to a stop is a 'half halt' then I guess I am doing one but I'll be damned if I know how I did it. Nor can I replicate it.  I've heard "stop the energy from behind". Um, if I knew what that felt like perhaps I would be more successful. As it is, I am still struggling with just hearing the horse. 

   Maybe I'll get a stop sign like on the school busses. 

Everyone wants a tiger

If you are an animal lover, as I have been since I first drew breath, you know the feeling.

You see it on television: this lovely animal, a living, breathing, unambiguously wild animal, living its life on its own terms. The camera catches behaviors that enchant you: an otter, playing with water, lion cubs chasing their mother’s tail, a tiger playing with her cub in the snow. You want that. You want that creature; you want to experience the behavior first hand. You want to feel a oneness with the animal. You want it to be a member of your family. In other words, a pet.

Not because you want it to be like your dog, or your cat, no-you want to be a part of that animal’s wildness, to become it. You want to BE that tiger, that lion, that dolphin, living the life as it does…but with your own human mind intact. You want to share in that experience, be that animal. You want to BE a lioness roaring in the night. You want to be a wolf, roaming with a pack.  

You want to be Elsa.

Elsa the lion by Joy Adamson

You want to see the same things the cameraman saw.

You want to experience the obvious intelligence of Rascal, or Mijbil, or Alex.

But that is impossible. So we try the next best thing: bringing it into our world.

Thus you hear of crazy-and disastrous-attempts: a 400 pound Siberian tiger raised (and abandoned) in a tiny New York flat. Any number of parrots and macaws, snatched from the wild to spend the rest of its life in a cage not much larger than its wingspan. You want an elephant to share her deepest thoughts with you.

Those with money and the best of intentions still find it daunting, keeping wild animals in impossibly small enclosures and feeding them on beef or chicken. Somehow deep inside, no matter how well they care for their wildlings, it's still not the same. It’s still not the Serengeti.

We shouldn’t, as individuals, take an animal from the wild and keep it in a sad facsimile of its natural habitat.  

We already have animal companions, many of them direct descendants of the wild ones.  The chicken was domesticated so far back in history it’s unknown when it occurred.  The dog was probably first domesticated from South East Asian wolves by the people we now call Aborigines, who carried them with them when they invaded Australia, 40,000 years ago.  The pig, the goat, the sheep and the cow were domesticated in what are now Turkey, Iraq and Iran, 8K years ago. The horse was domesticated by the Scythians on the Ukrainian steppe 6,000 years ago. The Egyptians domesticated the donkey 5K years ago, and attempted to do the same with the cat.  I hesitate to state that cats are domesticated. No, they are the only animal to willingly step into OUR world, unlike the rest that were taken from the wild for a purpose. Cats will sleep in your lap but are still quite capable of surviving in the wild, much to the detriment of songbirds.  The camelids: llamas, Bactrian and Dromedary camels were brought into the human fold about 2500 years ago. If you note, the longer the period of domestication, the more of a pet the animal is.  There are a few other animals: elephants, guinea pigs, and ferrets, for instance, that people have tamed, but have not domesticated. 
Most of the animals we domesticated we did so in order to eat them or enslave them. Or both. 

The nine (I lump the camelids all in one tribe) are the only ones out of the thousands of mammals on this planet that have been successfully domesticated, (and the camelids don’t do it nicely.)

The one animal we forget when we think of domesticated animals is us. I would hesitate to say Homo sapiens is civilized. Domesticated, perhaps, in that we willingly live in unnatural habitats and eat just about anything, but we certainly are not civil. We didn’t become even slightly domesticated until 10K ago, when we began farming. Up until then we acted like our cousins, the chimps, which are quite capable of tearing you apart. A case, actually many millions of cases can be made that we humans are still savagely tribal.

Despite the trappings and conveniences of civilization, we still long for the wilderness. We envy the freedom of a lion living on his own terms, living and dying under a broad African sky, wandering over an endless landscape beneath stars and sky, amidst millions of wildebeest, zebras and gazelle. We would love to live like that, but, of course, with the comforts we’ve grown used to: air conditioning, screens to keep the bugs out, electricity to read a blog on a computer, jets to carry us wherever we want to go quickly and comfortably, flush toilets, cooked food on a daily basis, cool, clean water.

 So we take the animals we still love: lions, tigers, bears, leopards, otters (do you see what I see? The ones we want are carnivores.) out of the wild, trying to recover that feeling of wilderness, that taste of freedom.

We have destroyed their world, and yet we want it.

When you take an animal out of the wild, no matter how well you care for it, still, you have changed it into a captive. No matter how entrancing, it is still a prisoner, subject to whatever you choose to do to it or with it. When it matures into the wild animal it is, it begins to demonstrate normal behaviors that are, in many cases, harmful to us, the person who "raised it from a baby". Suddenly it is no longer a cute cub, it is a full grown Bengal tiger who isn’t so amenable to you taking away something it wants. That’s when the owner turns to the zoo. They think, oh, the zoo will want this animal, everyone knows that.

But it isn’t always the case. Zoos are highly organized and, these days, scientifically run institutions with stud books, 'natural' habitats that are difficult and expensive to create and maintain. Quite honestly, the zoo has no place for your suddenly too dangerous or hard to keep pet. They have no room for your pet, nor does your pet fit into the often balanced communities in the zoo. Your pet has never learned to be what it is. For all it knows, it is a human, and has no idea what it means to be a lion or a bear or a chimpanzee.  

I have this love/hate affair with zoos, in that the animal is being kept in captivity. Its young will never see the wilderness, it will never live its own life. It is not allowed to make decisions. Its behavior is frustrated by the necessary sterility of an unnatural, tiny habitat. Food is provided, it no longer needs to use its wits to hunt. Its mates are chosen for it.  It stops being a wild thing, and becomes: animated art, a mere symbol of what used to be. I hope the animal does not know what it has lost.

Because its wild world is gone.

The wilderness is gone. We have eaten it. We have torn out the jungles, dropped the forests, paved over the prairies, poisoned the oceans, drained the marshes, killed the reefs.  We have irreversibly changed the planet into a human one, and there is no place for wild things to live without interference (‘management’) or poaching, hunting, killing it for no reason other than its interfering with US.

Do we allow them to go extinct? Do we allow the last black rhinoceros, the last elephant, the last condor, and the last tiger, to really be the last?

No. I hate it, but no. We have destroyed the wilderness, but we cannot allow the creatures that evolved alongside us, indeed, long before us, to go extinct. If for no other reason than to remind us what we have done.

No matter how badly one wants it, you cannot recreate a wilderness by bringing a wild animal into your home.

If you want to read why, please read “Ring of Bright Water” by Gavin Maxwell. A brilliant author, Maxwell wanted an otter as a pet.  You must read the book to learn why, and in hindsight, even he realized belatedly that doing so was the wrong thing to do. Still you cannot help but be entranced by his descriptions of his otters at play, their obvious affection for him, their personalities, their lives. 

He had two species, one the native species to his Scotland, and two others, clawless otters from Africa.  They were all enchanting animals, but they were also still wild, and, being mustelids, could demonstrate an instantaneous change from rollicking clown to an attacker demonstrating such relentless ferocity that it cost one caretaker a couple fingers. It was the nature of the beast, so to speak, not that the otters were mean, or bad, or mistreated. No, they were wild otters, and were merely acting as such.

Having been raised in captivity, the African otters would never have been successfully released to the wild, although the Scottish otters were. They, however, did not live long, as they would readily approach strange humans who, in one case, killed the otter because-well, because he was a human and the animal was an otter.   

No other book I have read of people taking wild animals into their home is as wonderful, yet heart breaking as “Ring of Bright Water”. Yet it should be required reading for anyone even contemplating a wild animal as a pet.

Wild animals are not pets. They entrance and enchant us precisely because they are wild, because they are beautiful, because they are NOT a dog or a cat.

I met a woman who worked with the big cats in a large city zoo. She told me: “All the cats are the same. It doesn’t matter how big or small, they all act the same.”

So you HAVE a tiger. She sleeps in your lap. She pounces on you from ambush. she curls her tail around your leg, telling you how much she loves you and won’t you please hurry up with that tin of cat food? She purrs, she plays, and she loves you. She happens to be the perfect size: not too big like her Siberian cousin, not so small that you can’t play with her.

Wolf Park, photographer unknown

The wolf you admire? His domesticated descendant is sitting in the car, waiting to go places with you. He will chase things for you. He will bring them back. He will point out other wild things. He’s the perfect size and temperament. He’s not as smart as a wolf, but then, he won’t tear the couch apart looking for the squeaky toy…well, wait...I do know dogs that destructive.

From reddit, photographer unknown but that is a 'pet' wolf

Leave the parrots and macaws in the wild. No bird likes to live in a cage.

If you want a pet, get one that’s already been domesticated.