Siegfried & Roy special

[tigertoy]

I posted this to an exotic feline mailing list I'm on, but I thought I'd share it with my LJ audience and see what comment anyone might have.

I'm surprised there hasn't been any discussion of the Siegfried and Roy special. I watched it last night. I thought it was padded with a disapppointing amount of fluff, as though they didn't have enough real material and they were desperately trying to fill the hour, but there was definitely stuff I wanted to see.

What really bothers me is that they actually had Roy saying that he had the stroke first and then Montecore pulled him off the stage, Siegfried saying that if Montecore had meant to hurt Roy, Roy would have been dead "in two seconds", and even Roy saying "he [Montecore] saved my life", yet outside of those brief bits, the message was still that the tiger attacked Roy. Roy has no ill will toward Montecore, but the show's producers apparently don't want the country to feel that way.

Comments

[starstraf.livejournal.com]

I think the interview lady was pretty surprised that Roy has no ill will but I didn't get that the producers don't want the country to feel that way. I think mostly it was a story about partners and recovery and the will power it takes. I actually think they said little or nothing about the felines. I agree they only had about 10-15 minutes of material

[bammba-m.livejournal.com]

i'm positive that what they said was that Roy had some sort of blood pressure spike which is what caused him to get dizzy and fall down on stage. The stroke came some time later.

Personally, i get Roy not having any ill will. i'm a little leery of his belief that Montecore saved his life, tho. There are dogs that are used to detect seizures, so it wouldn't surprise me if Montecore sensed that Roy was in some sort of medical distress (like a blood pressure spike) and was just doing what he was trained to do when things weren't right (which is return to his cage). If he wanted to, he could have easily killed Roy with one bite (as i'm sure you know and they did mention on the show). As a predator, it just wouldn't shock me to find out that tigers know when we have some sort of medical ailment that even we aren't aware of. Their job in the wild is to pick off the weak, sick, injured or old. i know i saw some documentary where they autopsied some sort of prey animal that had been killed and they found that it had cancer or some blood disease or a tumor of some sort, i forget exactly but the animal appeared healthy and was not.

If you've watched any nature show in which the host gets bit or scratched, you hear them talk immediately about how it was their (the person's) fault for the injury. Which is what both gentlemen did. And Steve Irwin (crocodile hunter) has said many times that if he were to die at the mouth of a croc, all of his work at conservation and protection of wildlife would be for nothing because all anyone would say is, "One finally got him." The producers probably took the angle that the tiger attacked because that's all they really know. (Irresponsible, but not malicious.)

i'm with Star in that it seemed really more about recovery and partnership than about animal attacks.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

"They" didn't say anything about Roy being impaired before Montecore did anything. Roy himself said that he'd collapsed, due to a stroke brought on by his high blood pressure, but the other material didn't amplify that at all, and in fact directly contradicted Roy's own account of what happened.

He did have an additional stroke or strokes after he was at the hospital.

Clearly, the main thrust of the show was on Roy's recovery, which is really amazing. What actually happened on the stage and whose fault it was was a small part of the show, but in that part of the show the message I thought they were pushing was that the big bad dangerous tiger turned on his owner. It may be primarily out of ignorance, but when they spend millions of dollars to make a program interviewing the greatest living animal trainer and don't manage to learn enough from the experience to overcome that ignorance, that's very shoddy journalism. I think the sensationalism is a deliberate attempt sell more soap flakes.

Yes, I know I'm hypersensitive on the subject.