Meet Ginger Guttner: The voice behind Mike the Tiger

With over 150,000 followers on Instagram and 69,600 on X (formerly Twitter), LSU’s live tiger, Mike VII, has a social media personality unique to his species. But since tigers can’t type, meet the woman behind the work, Ginger Guttner.

Guttner has been with LSU’s faculty since 2004, serving as the communications manager for the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine as well as an adjunct instructor with Manship’s School of Mass Communication.

Her role is unique to LSU because she is responsible for creating a viral personality for an animal that doesn’t even know that the internet exists.

While Guttner has discussed her work in a TED Talk back in 2017, the LSU alumna first started working with Mike VI’s social media in 2010.

“Because the veterinary school is responsible for Mike’s care, and I’m the spokesperson for the veterinary school, it just seemed like a natural extension to add Mike to that,” Guttner said.

One element that Guttner has kept in mind is how Mike is his own being, and she doesn’t know what he’s thinking, so she started his social media by speaking from the third person.

“It was disingenuous and fake to speak from his point of view and use the pronoun ‘I’ because I don’t know if he’s thrilled,” she said. “I mean, I think he’s happy based on his behavior, but I can’t sit down and chat with him.”

However, over the course of time and experience, this eventually changed, and now viewers can find posts on Mike’s Instagram captioned in the first person.

Since Guttner has worked with Mike VII for so many years, she has learned what his behaviors look like and how to interact with him, including how to deliver a chuff.

Tiger chuffs, or prustens, are ways that humans can greet the apex predators, and it’s how Guttner has greeted Mike for years.

“He certainly knows who his people are,” she said. “I can get him to open his eyes and stand up, but I think it’s because he associates me with the people who feed him. But yes, I think he definitely knows who I am.”

In addition to learning some of the tiger’s behavior patterns, Guttner has also learned some of the expectations of Mike’s audience, including what game-day posts look like for his Instagram.

If you keep up with the posts made during the football season, then you would know that the night before LSU home games, Mike feasts on the logos of the opposing teams that are set to play in Death Valley on Saturdays.

And, of course, everything has a start, just as this annual tradition did for Guttner and Mike.

The tradition initially began as a joke between her and Mike’s student caretakers around 2012.

“One of them made his dinner into the shape of the Alabama “A”, that cursive “A”, and sent me a photo of it and the other caretaker laughed, ‘Hahaha, Mike’s gonna eat Alabama,’” Guttner said. “When the next set of caretakers came on board, I showed them that because I thought it was funny. And one of them said, ‘Can we do that?’”

From there, Mike’s caretakers have hand-shaped his food into college football logos for the last 10 years, making for beloved Instagram posts for LSU fans all around.

Beyond these traditions, something else to consider is how does Guttner get such up-close photos of Mike, where do all these pictures come from?

Given that she’s in close proximity to Mike, she is able to snap a few photos of herself beyond the fence and glass of habitat, but the majority of them come from his veterinary student caretakers, and those shots are snapped from the inner gate to the side of Mike’s habitat.

But that gate is there for more than just pretty pictures.

“It’s actually part of their job is to get a fence closer,” Guttner said.”They can really observe him and get a really up close look to see if there’s anything physically going on that they need to talk to the veterinarian about. But getting the pictures is a fabulous extra.”

In forming Mike’s social media, Ginger uses the photos that she takes as a way of communicating with the public as to when the tiger is outside for audiences to visit.

If Mike is posted outside in his habitat, then he should be there when fans come to see that day, likely hiding within the corners of his yard, unless the caption says otherwise.

The only day you won’t find Mike outside is on Thursdays, when his habitat is undergoing mandatory yard work.

So if you ever find yourself wanting to visit the only live tiger mascot on a college campus, just make sure to check his social media for an update from Guttner so you know before you go.