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On
Thursday, March 25th, at 9pm EST/PST (8pm
Central),
Animal Planet TV will broadcast the documentary
The
Tiger Next Door, which will be available on DVD
from
First Run Features beginning April 20th.
The
Tiger Next Door tells the story of a man named Dennis
Hill who has been breeding and selling tigers out of his backyard in
Flat Rock, Indiana for over fifteen years. When the film begins Hill has
24
tigers, 3 bears, 6 leopards, and one cougar, and he faces an inspection
by the local Department of Natural Resources that may shut him down for
good.
As Hill fights to hold on to his tigers over the days and months that
follow, The Tiger Next Door follows him –
exploring his motives, his past, and the curious, ethically-murky world
he’s created in his backyard. The film also travels far beyond Hill's
animal compound, introducing a shocking array of news stories about
tiger situations gone wrong around the country, and revealing the
alarming
statistic that there are more tigers in private captivity in the U.S.
than there are in the wild in the world.
All
of which raises the question — What do we want our relationship with
wild
animals to be, as the wild disappears? Under what circumstances is it
okay to keep large wild animals captive?
This
film and the topic of wild animals in captivity are highly relevant and
timely,
in light of recent news stories about:
— a trainer killed by a
12,300lb whale at SeaWorld (Feb, 2010)
— a man killed by his
“pet” tiger in Ontario, Canada (Jan, 2010)
— a woman killed by her
“pet” bear in Pennsylvania (Oct, 2009)
— the
story from last winter (Feb 2009) of the Connecticut woman who was
brutally mauled by her neighbor’s 200 pound “pet” chimpanzee,
— and the story of the tiger escape and mauling of a teenager at
the San Francisco Zoo (Dec 2007).
These
are only the latest in a long list of problematic stories of captive
bred wild
animals gone “bad.” Incidents like these raise difficult ethical
questions and important sociological issues for people and animals that
are addressed in The Tiger Next Door.
