You’re No One Without A Pet Tiger: How The Gulf’s Rich Kids Show Off

Cheetahs are on the precipice of extinction because of relentless poaching on behalf of the children of oligarchs, and showing off collections of rare big cats has become de rigueur on social media.

Imagine you’re an obscenely wealthy Emirati heir, a Saudi prince, or the scion of a global business empire in Dubai.

You started an Instagram account, but sadly photos of your Lamborghinis and McLarens aren’t really moving the needle. In the circles you run in, everyone has those. Likewise, your $20 million digs are pedestrian by the standards of Gulf opulence, and showing off private jets is so 2023.

You need something to stand out, to show the peasants that you’re not just a fabulously affluent heir, you’re also really cool and everyone should envy you.

You need a big cat.

Maybe even cats, plural, if you can’t swing an ultra rare white lion or an 850lb liger on the illegal wildlife market.

“I’m not trying too hard in this photo, am I?”

Just imagine your follower count blowing up, and how jealous the peasantry will be when you post images of your apex predator pet chillin’ in the passenger seat of your Sesto Elemento, with a pair of $20,000 sunglasses on his head for the lulz.

That’s what’s currently happening in the Gulf among the incredibly well-off children of royalty, aristocrats, oil oligarchs, shipping magnates and other bigwigs, a report in Semafor notes.

“Of course you can’t put them in the Lamborghini, beratna! You don’t want those claws near your leather seats. Besides, my liger shall have his own custom made Koenigsegg with a gear shift he can operate by paw!”

In addition to providing compelling ‘tent to their social feeds in the form of photos and videos, it’s clear the owners believe big cats offer a kind of osmotic badassery: if you have your very own lion, you must be a powerful and interesting person!

This kind of thing is not new. Years ago there was a brief outcry when wildlife groups begged authorities to protect cheetahs, who are already critically endangered and risk extinction if global elites are allowed to continue to poach them and their cubs from the wild.

As CNN noted at the time:

“While many of these states – including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia – ban the private ownership and sale of wild animals, enforcement is lax.

The overwhelming majority of these cheetahs end up in Gulf Arab mansions, where Africa’s most endangered big cats are flaunted as status symbols of the ultra-rich and paraded around in social media posts, according to CCF and trafficking specialists.”…

The trend is of “epidemic proportions,” according to CCF, an organization devoted to saving cheetahs in the wild. At the current rates of trafficking, the cheetah population in the region could soon be wiped out.

“If you do the math, the math kind of shows that it’s only going to be a matter of a couple of years [before] we are not going to have any cheetahs,” said Laurie Marker, an American conservation biologist biologist and founder of CCF.

Youtube has its share of dauphins showing off cats and cars, and Instagram has an entire sub-genre of pages featuring men in pristine white robes posing in million-dollar hyper cars next to cheetah cubs or tigers who have been sedated to their eyeballs.

As the Semafor report explains, technically keeping big cats is illegal in most Gulf states, except for the super rich. They can skirt existing wildlife laws by getting permits as private “zoo” and “sanctuary” operators, and who’s to say a good zookeeper can’t keep his jaguars in an enclosure with Maseratis and Aston Martins?

One guy even runs a place called Fame Park, a private zoo. The only way to get in is if he deems you famous enough, and thus worthy, to gaze upon his wondrous menagerie of endangered beasts.

The park’s motto is “Where luxury meets wildlife wonder,” and its operator styles himself as a conservationist who just happens to enjoy rubbing elbows with esteemed figures like Andrew Tate and Steven Seagal.

“What pet? I am a licensed zookeeper! In my zoo, enrichment is provided by Ferrari.”

Things really haven’t changed much in the last few hundred years, have they? One way royals and aristocrats amused themselves was by sending explorers to far off lands and instructing them to bring back strange animals.

That’s how elephants ended up in the courts of European kings, and how Hanno the Navigator found himself in mortal danger when he tried to capture gorillas, then decided they were “too violent” to drag back home and had them executed.

A court elephant photographed in 1851 by Eugene Clutterbuck Impey, an English administrator in the British Raj. This elephant is pictured in regalia used for royal processions and other ceremonies. Credit: National Gallery of Scotland

These days, the centers of power have shifted, but human behavior has not. Part of me still has hope, but the cynic in me fears people with the means to exploit rare and endangered animals will continue to do so until there are no more animals left to exploit.

Another critically endangered pet cheetah in a hyper car. Credit: Some clown’s Instagram
Everyone knows that in the wild, big cat cubs nurse from Ferraris and Lamborghinis, and cheetahs learn to run fast by participating in drag races against the hyper cars. Credit: Another clown’s Instagram

15 thoughts on “You’re No One Without A Pet Tiger: How The Gulf’s Rich Kids Show Off”

  2. That’s extremely disturbing on top of all the other atrocities against animals. These people are spoiled, entitled and have no real heart for these animals. These animals need special food, care and enrichment. When war comes to middle Eastern cities and destroys, a lot of these kept animals, if they survive, have to be rescued. How to help change all this stupidity?

    Grrrrrrrrr!!!

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    1. There’s a great graphic novel called Pride of Baghdad that chronicles the escape of four lions from the Baghdad zoo during the opening phases of the Iraq War. The lions are anthropomorphized and each one represents a different view on the invasion and life under a tyrant, but otherwise the events really happened, and those lions were wandering the streets as US war planes bombed facilities and strafed Iraqi military units that hadn’t fled.

      Honestly I don’t think most of them live that long. It’s very difficult to keep an adult tiger or lion, and the vast majority of the photos show babies and juveniles.

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  3. The “like” is for your coverage of this topic … The idea of owning wild, exotic and/or rare animals, large or small, is foolish. There used to be a guy here who had a tiger and would drive around with it beside him in the seat of a truck … Lots of (reliable) people saw them. Authorities eventually came and got the tiger, I heard. I don’t know the details, but it’s always a bad idea.

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  5. For some unknown reason, WordPress would not allow me to post my reply:

    Why don’t famous figures like Andrew Tate and Steven Seagal refuse to go to these “private zoos”?
    I don’t know how much time you have for reading, but if you will read The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, you will find out how we got where we are today and why we allow the ultra-rich to get away with what they do.

    Thanks, Steve!

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    1. “Steven Seagal is out of his mind” clip from comedian Tom Segura:

      I laughed my ass off the first time I saw that, but the thing is, he’s not even exaggerating how Steven Seagal behaves or the things that come out of his mouth. I remember reading a GQ profile years ago in which Steven Seagal’s domestic servants warned the writer to call him “the wise and Honorable Rinpoche” because he’d paid some Buddhist organization some vast sum to declare him the reincarnation of a revered Bodhisattva lol.

      Apparently Steven Seagal has been living in Russia for years and is pals with Putin.

      Anyway, that book sounds interesting. I read a bit about the premise and it sounds like the consumerism Veblen critiques is tantamount to the society-wide consumerism our entire economy hinges on now, in which everything grinds to a halt if people stop buying crap. Few people are bothered by what’s going on as long as they can afford big screen TVs and lease nice cars.

      The political engagement we’ve seen in the last 10 years is surface level. People who spend all their waking hours raging about Trump or Biden/Kamala are just repeating talking points, and most of them can’t name their own congressman or articulate the roles of the executive, legislative and judiciary branches in government.

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    1. You could argue the Champawat tigress was doing that. When the legendary tiger hunter Jim Corbett finally took her down, after she’d claimed an official tally of 436 human victims (and probably a lot more in reality, since her reign of terror lasted 10 years and spanned two countries), he realized she had broken teeth as a result of a hunter bungling a shot at her. That made it more difficult to take down typical tiger prey, so she switched to humans, but I’m confident she didn’t mind doing that after what that hunter did to her.

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