Consider a nightmare scenario. On a random weekday, you’re abducted from your home by towering humanoid figures who shove you into an iron cage. You have no idea what’s going on, or whether your captors mean to hurt you. The cage is cramped, barely large enough for you to turn around. And then they roll you (and your cage) into a circular arena, full of thousands of others like themselves, all bellowing at the top of their lungs. The noise is ear-splitting, and you don’t know if you'll ever make it home again. 

This is precisely the experience that Louisiana’s Governor Jeff Landry has gone out of his way to inflict on a one-year-old Bengal tiger. Back in June, I wrote that Landry might prove to be the worst governor in America, and he seems determined to prove me right. Since then, he’s gone on a ridiculous crusade to put the Ten Commandments in every Louisiana classroom, vetoed any regulation on AI “deepfakes” of political figures, tried to force college athletes to stand for the national anthem, ordered violent police “sweeps” against the homeless citizens of New Orleans (so visiting Taylor Swift fans wouldn’t have to see them), and committed countless other awful acts. But the tiger thing is a new low, even for him. 

The whole fracas started in September, when Landry made it known that he wanted Louisiana State University (LSU) to revive an old tradition: having a live tiger as a mascot at its football games. This barbaric practice started in the mid-1930s, when some of the university’s athletics coaches got together and bought a tiger named Mike from a zoo in Little Rock, Arkansas. Since then, successive generations of Mikes have been made to serve as LSU football mascots. Like something out of a Roman coliseum, they’ve been wheeled out onto the field in tiny cages for the crowd to cheer and shout at. Sometimes they would also be “parked right outside the visitor’s locker room” to intimidate opposing players, or a local sports reporter would shove a microphone in the unhappy tiger’s face, hoping to elicit a roar. The last tiger to be treated this way was Mike VI, whose tenure at LSU lasted from 2007 until his death in 2016. In his last years, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) wrote an open letter pointing out the obvious—that the whole caged-tiger schtick was blatantly cruel: 

[Tigers,] at LSU games, are subjected to a constant barrage of disorienting lights and activity. [...] Even under the best of care, a tiger’s most basic instincts are thwarted in captivity, and continuing to use live animals as mascots perpetuates the cruel notion that sensitive, complex wild animals should be caged and put on display like championship trophies.

 

People go to LSU football games because they want to see top college athletes playing the best football in the country, not because there’s a caged tiger sitting on the sidelines. I hope you agree that it’s time to recognize society’s growing distaste for animal exhibition and bring a new tradition to LSU of using only willing, costumed human mascots. Orcas don’t belong in tanks, elephants don’t belong in the circus, and tigers do not belong in stadiums.

Zoological science supports this view. Among other things, tigers’ hearing is far more sensitive than ours. They have those big cup-shaped cat ears, and can communicate with each other and search out prey over long distances using sound frequencies humans can’t even detect. If a noisy football stadium is enough to make our ears ring, the experience must be excruciating for them—and LSU has one of the loudest stadiums in the country, known for “earthquake games” whose vibrations register on seismographs. Studies suggest, too, that unnecessary stress can have all kinds of negative effects on the big cats’ health. Acquiescing to PETA’s demands, LSU ended its tiger tradition in 2017, and Mike VII—who arrived on campus the same year—has never been used as an object of amusement for football fans to hoot and holler at. Instead, he’s lived out his days in a roomy habitat at the university’s School of Veterinary Medicine, where he gets to play with big rubber balls and have meat cakes for his birthday. The change was a clear victory for animal rights, one of several that came around this time; just a year prior, both Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circuses had stopped featuring captive elephants. But Jeff Landry wasn’t happy about the new state of affairs at all.

Notably, Landry never attended LSU. His higher education came from the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Southern University Law School, and the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, in that order. So it’s a little unclear why he’s so concerned with the sports culture of a university that’s not even his alma mater. When asked this by the Louisiana Illuminator, state Representative Wayne McMahen speculated that “a major LSU donor asked the governor to intervene,” which sounds plausible. In any case, Landry spent September and October trying to convince LSU officials to reverse their stance and press Mike VII into service as a mascot. He brought it up at press conferences, calling it an “unbelievable opportunity” and dismissing concerns for the tiger’s welfare, saying that “everybody that has some anxiety over this needs to calm down.” Still, university officials—who reportedly feared that LSU could lose its status with the USDA to operate as a tiger habitat at all—stuck to their guns, and declined to go along with the idea. 

Landry didn’t give up, though. Instead, he took a lot of extra time and effort to ensure that a different tiger would have to suffer. According to reporting in the Louisiana Illuminator, his office got in touch with an exotic animal trainer from Florida, Mitchel Kalmanson, who made the journey to Baton Rouge with a young tiger named Omar Bradley in tow. Kalmanson has been compared to Joe Exotic from the show Tiger King, and as PETA has documented, he has an extensive history of USDA citations for animal abuse and neglect, including incidents where he “euthanized two tigers with a history of kidney disease by apparently shooting them,” kept tigers in a transport vehicle with “a foul odor, maggots, a buildup of food and excreta, and exposed insulation,” and had tigers in his care escape on two separate occasions (one of which attacked an elephant). 

None of this apparently gave Landry any pause. Instead, the governor told Fox News that “Our hope is that maybe we can get this tiger to roar a couple of times, and that’ll indicate how many touchdowns we’ll have.” (Yes, that’s the caliber of intellect we’re dealing with here.) Landry may even have paid out-of-pocket to hire Kalmanson, who says he received no state funds. Omar was indeed hauled out during the LSU vs. Alabama game on November 9, and in YouTube footage of the event you can see him pacing uncomfortably around his tiny enclosure as a bright spotlight is aimed at him and the crowd roars. A local ESPN columnist says the tiger appeared “heavily sedated”—although Kalmanson denies using drugs—and according to students who attended the game, there was also a marching band “playing directly towards him at points, and fireworks were shot off.” There’s no two ways about it: this was animal abuse, purely for the sake of spectacle. It’s the kind of thing that should have passed into the history books decades ago, and should never be brought back. 

It’s worth underlining, too, that virtually nobody besides Jeff Landry seems to have wanted this. Certainly the LSU community didn’t. The editorial board of their student newspaper, the Reveille, has condemned Landry’s decision as an “embarrassment,” and the university’s student government has unanimously passed a resolution to prevent any tiger from being brought into the stadium again—although it’s unclear if they have any actual power to enforce that. LSU ecology students started a Change.org petition to “keep the tradition discontinued,” which has received over 8,300 signatures, and several veterinary medicine students held a protest on game day. (Memorable signs included “JUSTICE FOR OMAR” and “JEFF L. DOESN’T EVEN GO HERE.”) On their online message boards, even the football fans speculate that Landry has cursed the LSU team, which lost 42-13 to Alabama. 

On the Monday after his little stunt, Landry attempted to defend himself from the backlash, and he said something very interesting: 

It’s about tradition. At the end of the day, these woke people have tried to take tradition out of this country. It’s tradition that built this country.

This is ridiculous, considering that the “tradition” in question is shoving a tiger in a cage and yelling at it. But it also reveals something important about the conservative mindset, since a fixation on “tradition” for its own sake is a mainstay of right-wing thought. To the extent that conservatism contains any ideas, one of the big ones is that if something has always been done, it must be inherently good, and should continue to be done—regardless of how pointless or absurd the thing is on its own terms. Having a king or queen is “traditional,” so British conservatives cling to monarchy when most of the world has (quite rightly) discarded it as an embarrassing relic. Homophobia is often framed as a defense of “traditional marriage” or the “traditional family.” Now, it’s clear that Jeff Landry believes an abhorrent “tradition” like torturing a tiger is an important part of the foundation of Louisiana’s society. It’s always been done, so it always must be done. Likewise, he views compassion for other living creatures as risible “wokeness” that can be dismissed out of hand. 

What’s more, we can connect Landry’s tiger-baiting to another ugly aspect of conservative thought: the obsession with hierarchy, authority, and dominance. He’s not the only prominent Republican who makes a big deal out of mistreating animals, after all. There’s Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric, who like to go on safari (another outdated and barbaric animal-related ritual) and take nauseating pictures of themselves holding dead leopards. There’s Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, the mastermind behind Project 2025, who allegedly killed his neighbor’s dog with a shovel because it was barking too much. There’s South Dakota’s Governor Kristi Noem, who infamously bragged in her memoir about killing both a dog and a goat, which she touted as an example of her ability to make “tough decisions.” All of these people share a core belief that animals are beneath them in the hierarchy of lifeforms. To them, animals are not individuals whose lives matter, but pieces of property which human beings can use (or destroy) in any way they see fit. Many of them are trying to demonstrate their own toughness and dominance over nature in one form or another, just as drug traffickers do by keeping tigers, lions, and hippos as pets. In Landry’s case, it’s not just that he wants to torture a tiger; he wants to be seen doing it. He wants everyone to get the message that his will overrides both the animal’s, and that of any “woke” student or activist who might object. Smugly telling protesters to “calm down” is half the fun. It’s just another, particularly cruel and stupid form of “owning the libs.” 

Beyond even that, though, it’s absurd that Landry is spending any time, energy, or resources on the question of what kind of mascot the LSU football team should have. Right now, Louisiana has plenty of serious problems that should be occupying his attention instead. Its citizens have one of the lowest life expectancies in the entire United States, with only Mississippi and West Virginia ranking lower. It has an ongoing insurance crisis, as climate-related disasters are becoming more common and driving costs through the roof. It has a majority-Black area called “Cancer Alley” that’s been devastated by chemical pollution. It has the “bloodiest prison in the U.S.,” a former slave plantation called Angola where a federal judge has ruled that the healthcare “is not care at all, but abhorrent cruel and unusual punishment.” As governor, Landry’s primary responsibility is to address these problems—literally, to govern. But he shows no sign of doing so. After all, that would require him to create better public healthcare, reform the police and prisons, and crack down on the fossil fuel industry, and as a Republican he’s ideologically opposed to doing any of that. So instead of meaningful governance, he gives us a tiger in a cage, and he hopes the resulting controversy will distract from his incompetence, venality, and corruption. 

I’ll leave you with a modest proposal. If there’s some segment of the LSU football crowd who really do want to see a violent, brutish creature in a cage, why not shove Governor Jeff Landry in there and make him roar and snarl for his supper? See how he likes it for a change.