Tiger Stadium has a capacity of over 100,000 people.
Not a single seat is set aside for a tiger – mascot or not.
That’s the way it should be, yet Saturday’s football matchup against Alabama saw a live tiger grace the inside of Death Valley for about the first time in a decade.
Mike the Tiger’s old trailer cage was paraded in the pregame show before a packed stadium. The lights fell to a deep purple before a single spotlight shone on the cage, with the bars casting severe shadows over the tiger.
Cheers and boos erupted from the crowd, most of them to some degree confused.
The tiger was not Mike VII. The university disallowed his display in 2017, saying it would, going forward, work to serve as strictly a sanctuary for future tigers.
“Responsible care for live exotic animals has evolved throughout the years, and LSU has evolved with it,” the university said in an official statement. “LSU has decided that the tiger will not go into Tiger Stadium on home football game days. He will be out in his yard seven days a week.”
It was instead Omar Bradley, a one-year-old tiger housed in Florida by an owner that’s been cited with animal abuse, selected as Saturday’s guest of honor.
Omar’s appearance comes after months of anticipation and a campaign spearheaded by none other than Louisiana’s chief executive, Gov. Jeff Landry.
Since at least September, he and a few other Republican congressmen have pushed for Mike the Tiger to be included in a home football game.
Landry had said before that he was hoping to honor the legacy of past Mike mascots, and on a Friday FOX News broadcast, he said there was hope to “get this tiger to roar a couple of times.”
He continued, saying that perhaps for every roar, LSU’s football team would score a touchdown.
Omar must’ve remained silent. The game was a disappointing blowout loss.
The embarrassment extends far beyond football. It’s a vantage for the state and flagship university’s questionable handling of issues affecting all of Louisiana.
Landry’s crusade for a tiger on the field has drawn widespread bipartisan criticism for months. It spurred protests on campus and even an official condemnation from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, also known as PETA, saying the display was “shameful” and “idiotic.”
Academic journals suggest that loud, earthquake-like atmospheres like Tiger Stadium hold negative ramifications on a tiger’s immune system, furthering their ability to contract diseases.
His campaign for a tiger on the field is simply out of touch with the interests of LSU’s community. It reeks of his wanting to appeal to the wide-reaching demographic of LSU fans despite never having attended the university.
At his very best, this was an awkward attempt at popularity. At Landry’s worst, it’s an overreach of gubernatorial powers in which he strong-armed the university while holding its operating budget hostage and used taxpayer dollars to fund a dubiously constructed, wildly unpopular popularity stunt.
The energy Landry has devoted would be better spent on the special tax session he called, instead of on wrangling tigers.
And through it all, LSU has been strikingly silent. The university has issued no statements. It and the School of Veterinary Medicine have repeatedly not answered questions from the Reveille and other news outlets seeking clarification and logistical inquiry.
Has the university’s standard for responsible care of tigers changed? It seems contradictory that it’s been deemed unacceptable for mascot tigers to be paraded in the stadium but acceptable for non-mascot tigers to be.
Omar is not LSU’s mascot and should never have been used as a figurehead for Landry’s misguided nostalgia campaign. His appearance on the field is confusing, and the university’s seeming silence throughout Landry’s stunt makes it all the more bewildering.
