Another racking cough surges through his lungs as he moves from cage to cage, sliding the covered meat into the feline cats’ cages. The liquid sheen of sweat glints off his forehead with a blinding radiance. Grudgingly placing the container for the Malayan tigresses on the tip of the metal beam separating beast from human, he shuffles away, coughing raucously.
***
I bury my head into my mother’s stomach, embracing her coat of glossy fur and marveling at its softness. Moving at a glacial pace, I poke my paws up at her straightened whiskers. Just as I am about to drift away, my sister Azul’s head rolls onto my backbone, and I jolt awake with a start. Sharp, neon lights coming from a blurry black shape in the background reflects in my mother’s defiant glare.
The caretakers who feed me and my sister every day suddenly look menacing as they step closer in the night’s shadows. I’ve never seen a human so close, inside the cage. My privacy violated, I whimper uncomprehendingly as they lunge towards the familiar face I was toying with seconds before. Azul backs away, frightened at this unearthly hour, and I follow her into the adjoining cage. The metallic lock never seemed more confining, and my last, vague memory was that of a truck driving away, its rumbling tires punctuated by vehement roars of my beloved mother.
***
I look at my sister Azul, whose chest rises and falls as she sleeps in the thralls of feverish fatigue. We know something is wrong. Masks are taped to the pathetic, human noses when the attendants clean out the cages, as their injections probe into our hides incessantly, day in and day out. My anger against the selfish attitude of the humans manifested the day I saw how much they mistreated our families. Who takes a mother away from their child? While I could not speak out then, I was determined to do so now. The reason was as good as any- animals are entitled to the respect any human would reserve for another of their kin.
I bare my incisors bravely as I roar in the name of fury, snarling out the names of my comrades who carry the germs with disgust. My roar spreads from cage to cage, the metal beams rattling from the reverberating echoes. The whine of solidarity escapes the most tried of carnivorous animals, we all are one in our suffering. One in our recognition. We are a single race, and humans should not and cannot deny us our animal rights. Azul joins my effort to call together our clan. The aching void following my outburst is filled with the unspoken question, hanging in the brazen hot air.
“In the world where humans are dying, what place do tigers of sacred lineage, sullied in captivity, have?”
***
2/1/2050
The Director of Museums,
New York.
Dear Sir ,
The Bronx Zoo Corporation very much regrets to announce that the last of our tigers died last week. The greeting of the New Year was a dismal affair for all of us here in New York. I have been haunted for the past thirty years by the burden of my knowledge. I was the person in our zoo who infected these fine species with the dangerous virus. My symptoms were evident to me, but the fear of losing my job instigated my reckless silence.
These tigers represented the fragility of nature and we infected them with our carelessness; our dismissal which is the foundation for the destruction of an entire species. After they suffered with us, felt the same painful experience of covid, on our recovery, we abetted their journey to extinction.
Their seemingly insignificant participation in the covid pandemic was meant to teach us a lesson that we never learnt. Today, I enclose their story as I wish to ensure that it is archived in history and its magnitude is not lost.