Who Is Benefiting?

Cub-petting is, by definition, something done for, and benefiting only to, the humans who are doing the petting. A big cat literally has no need to ever be held by human hands. This is the sort of objective gaze with which conservation must be viewed.

We need to question and always keep in the back of our mind:

How does this animal, and future wild populations benefit from what's going on?; and

Is this being done for the animal alone?

When you apply these questions to situations eg., very small cubs being used for photo props, or in situations where customers can pay to hold and play with them, the fact is obvious these cubs are being bred and produced solely to be used to make money through charging customers a price to play with them.

Several exploiters (some of them well established) try to claim that they breed their big cats in order to sustain populations, and to eventually repopulate the wild.

This is literally a lie.

Genetically, captive bred big cats (for the most part, and with excitedly few exceptions) are not genetically pure, but are rather, "mutts" if you will.

Many are mixtures of two separate species (like Siberian and Bengal tiger mixes) and some are intentional hybrids, like Ligers (lions and tigers), which not only carry genetic defects like acromegaly (which causes their immense size) but which are also often sterile or otherwise unable to breed.

In America, one of the most uncontrolled aspects of private ownership of big cats, is the fact that authorities, for many years, didn't actually have authority over any animal which was not genetically pure and documented. This means that of the some 7,000-10,000 possible privately owned big cats in the US, virtually all of them ‘don't count’ as existing because they're of mixed bloodlines which will NEVER be used to ‘repopulate’ any existing wild habitat.

Once you eliminate the chance for ‘repopulation’ the only reason to continue breeding big cats in captivity, is to keep them in captivity - the number one reason for this continued breeding – so that the animals can be used in cub-petting situations.

In the US there is only a few months during a cub's early life that they can legally be handled by the public and to comply with existing laws, places like Dade City Wild Things, and T.I.G.E.R.S. must go through dozens of cubs per season in order to have them available for the public. Once they reach a few months of age and are too large to be used, they're sold off and new cubs are brought in. Where those older cubs go is largely a mystery. More than likely they go to private owners, breeding facilities or canned hunting situations over the border in Mexico.