Nini Tiger Dies

Yesterday I show up for an appointment with a writer for Cat Fancy magazine and am met at the gate by Jamie and Scott telling me that Nini, our 22 years old tigress, didn’t eat yesterday nor today.  The vet has been summoned and Nini is looking vacantly into space.

 

While Scott waits at the gate for Dr. Wynn, Jamie and I take the golf cart out to talk to Nini. We knew this day was coming but had been leaving the date of departure up to Nini.  As long as she was eating well and enjoying her days of napping in the sun by her pool we would try to not cry as we saw her disappearing before our eyes a little more each day.

 

Despite eating well she had been losing weight for the past couple of months.  We suspected a tumor in her stomach, but at her advanced age there was no point in subjecting her to surgery, chemo or even in anesthetizing her to run a battery of tests.  The knock down alone would have killed her and even if didn’t her options would have only meant pain and having to spend her last days in a hospital rather than in her lakefront cat-a-tat where volunteers had lovingly transported her fish friends when she had moved to this new enclosure last year.  All of the other tigers had eaten the fish that the volunteers had put in their pools, but Nini had made pets of hers.

 

I prayed for a sign to know what would be the best thing for Nini.  I stooped down to look in Nini’s cave and instead of the familiar look of recognition, as if happy to see me, she looked scared.  She seemed to say with her eyes that she know the time to depart was here, and like most of us, she was coming to terms with trying to face the unknown.

 

Here was a magnificent creature who had always had to be so brave.  As a smaller female, in an industry dominated by much larger, more powerful males, she could never show fear or she would be killed or mauled.  She had tolerated being stripped of all dignity by being made to perform for crowds of people who were too stupid to understand that the ticket they bought to watch her do tricks was what kept her confined to a circus wagon for the first 17 years of her life.

 

With tears streaming down my face; I wondered “Why?”  Why did she put up with that when most tigers don’t after they reach adulthood?  After retiring here in 2002 Nini became the most beloved of the circus cats.  She captivated the staff and volunteers with her graciousness, but even more remarkable was her effect on guests.  How many people came to me and said “I looked in her eyes and saw God!”  I am not sure what any of them meant by that, but it was obviously a spiritual experience for them.  Even more had confided that she spoke to them just as clearly as if out loud and in their own language.  I knew they were telling the truth, because she had told me she didn’t belong in a cage and that none of them did.  Nini had the rare ability to cross the species communication border and her message was always the same, “We are all ONE.”

 

Dr. Wynn arrives and concurs that Nini is never going to get better and that euthanasia is the most compassionate thing to do.  Moments seem like hours as I finally manage to speak the unspeakable and say that it’s time to end her life.  Who am I do decide that?  I can hardly write the words now, just as I could barely speak them then.  Jamie was silently crying and Scott was trying so hard to be stoic through this.  We have to face this over and over again, but it never gets any easier.

 

Once the agonizing decision was made we all wanted it to be done as quickly and painlessly as possible, but Nini still belonged to the circus and their vet wanted to be the one to put her to sleep.  She couldn’t be here until the following day.  Dr. Wynn tried to reconcile our emotions of having to make this decision with the reality that waiting until tomorrow was not going to make that much difference to Nini, who has known she was dying for a while now. I didn’t want Nini to have to experience