As you probably know, Dirk Arthur, the tiger-taming magician, died in October. In 2008, I spent the day with Arthur, “training” tigers for my Las Vegas Review-Journal column, “Fear and Loafing.” The reality, which I fully acknowledged in the piece, was that I merely walked one of his 13 tigers on a leash in a circle and nearly shit my pants.
My genuine fear made for good copy.
“In 2006,” I wrote, “a Minnesota tiger breeder was mauled to death inside a Bengal’s pen. In 2007, a woman was killed by a tiger at an exotic animal farm in Canada. And here I am in 2008, hoping that my life insurance agent doesn’t subscribe to the R-J.”
Well, here I am in 2024, wondering how the hell any of that ever happened.
What most people don’t know about me is that I’ve been a vegan since 1985. My journey toward recognizing the horror of factory farming began when I was four years old and asked my parents where steak came from. The “Should we reveal the dark secret?” look they shot each other is all I took away from that experience, not whatever their answer was.
That look stayed with me throughout childhood — until a college course called Physics & Buddhism made me realize that even the smallest of personal choices we make matter. At that point, my gnawing hypocrisy grew too loud to avoid correcting anymore.
So how did a vegan of 23 years not see the evil he was helping to promote in my Fear & Loafing story about Dirk Arthur? What about the self-justifying narratives created by our society allowed me to see animals in captivity as anything other than torture?
“Here’s the thing about holding a leash with a 500-pound tiger at the end of it,” I wrote in my R-J column. “It’s the tiger who walks you.”
Sabrina was the tiger’s name, by the way. She was the 15-year-old star of the disappearing-tiger trick that was the climax of Arthur’s show, and she performed on David Letterman’s magic week in 2008. She was stunning to look at.
I suppose I could claim to be a victim of my time. Like all Gen X kids, I watched whatever was on TV. That included chimps — taken from their mothers at birth — riding tricycles in circles on some variety show and tigers performing on late-night TV. I recall my parents taking me to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden two or three times. There, I saw a trainer actually whip elephants to get them to stand on their hind legs. Not only did I not find it repugnant, but also … I cheered.
Once, on vacation in Florida, I laughed at a zoo gorilla being forced to juggle for food. A gorilla! It was what my parents thought they knew about good parenting. And it normalized for me that entertainment could appropriately be provided by wild animals tortured specifically to provide that entertainment.
But I wasn’t any better. One of the greatest regrets of my life is that I repeated the indoctrination on our daughter when she was five, taking her to see the very last Ringling Bros. tour with elephants when it played at the Thomas & Mack Center.
I wasn’t just an innocent victim of my time. As far back as middle school, I knew enough to see through those McDonaldland commercials. I realized that Ronald McDonald was just a cover clown for the mass slaughter of millions of innocent animals every year. The thought made me regret eating the cheeseburgers my parents brought home for dinner — though I always got hungry enough to down at least one anyway.
The notion that, 30 years later, I still couldn’t see the hypocrisy right under my nose — or, more accurately, at the end of that 10-foot leash — boggles my mind. All I could think about was how much danger I was in, not how wrong the situation I inserted myself into was, as Sabrina followed Arthur’s cues and circled me.
“Good job holding on!” Arthur congratulated me afterward, as though letting a tiger escape onto the streets behind the Silverton was among my available options.
Maybe part of what scrambled my moral compass was that it seemed possible to distinguish good animal trainers from bad. And Dirk seemed like one of the good ones. I watched him coo lovingly to several of the 13 big cats on the ranch, and even bear-hug a snow tiger named Thurston backstage at his show at the Tropicana. He seemed attuned to their emotions and concerned about their welfare. To him, they were family.
The last time Arthur used his family in his magic act was in 2015 at the Riviera. That made “Dirk Arthur’s Wild Illusions” the official last big-cat show ever staged on the Las Vegas Strip. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though. As late as last July, he planned to use white and orange tigers, a snow leopard, and a bobcat in a show called “Magic Unleashed” that he had hoped to stage at the Notoriety Live theater in Fremont Street’s Neonopolis.
That was, until animal activists deluged the venue’s owner with 400 emails protesting Arthur’s animal abuse, enough to make him back out of the deal.
As I sat down to write Arthur’s obituary in October, my 2008 ignorance finally struck me like Mantacore had struck Roy Horn five years earlier. If an institution is evil, then that renders irrelevant any of the good qualities displayed by its perpetuators. Celebrating Dirk Arthur as one of the kindest animal trainers would be akin to celebrating George Washington as one of the kindest slaveholders.
All sentient beings deserve to live as freely as they possibly can. Should it matter just how sentient they are? Because tigers lack human intelligence, is that supposed to diminish our compassion for them? Should our compassion be diminished for children with intellectual deficits then?
My views about Arthur’s work had obviously changed since that day we spent together — as they have for the people in charge of circuses and zoos, which are now struggling with the challenge of promoting the welfare of the very animals they’re harming by confining them to cages and swimming pools.
Even now, though, I’m not as evolved as I like to think I am. In a social media post linking to my Arthur obit, I still found it necessary to mention how sweet of a guy I thought he was.
“Not too sweet when it came to tigers,” a Facebook friend shot back. “They don’t belong on stages and led around with a chain around their necks. It’s not entertainment. It’s a public display of abuse. Glad he’s forever unable to continue trying to make money off the poor backs of tigers. There’s no excuse.”
She was right, of course. There never was an excuse.