BATON ROUGE — News broke Thursday of a live tiger being brought in to be in attendance at LSU football’s game against Alabama on Saturday night (6:30 p.m., ABC).
Having a live tiger inside Tiger Stadium for football games was an old tradition LSU used to participate in dating back to the 1930s but had not had one in attendance for a game since 2015.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has been calling for the return of LSU having Mike the Tiger, the school’s resident live tiger, in the stadium in a cage for games. LSU has pushed back on the idea because of humane concerns for the the animal.
The Tiger at Saturday’s game won’t be Mike. Landry has worked it out to have a feline transported to LSU from Florida.
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PETA, an activist group who’s motto is “animals are not ours to use for entertainment,” issued a statement Thursday afternoon, calling the move by the governor “idiotic” and announced its nearly 50,000 supporters had already called on Landry to drop his project.
“It’s shameful and out of touch with today’s respect for wild species that LSU has bowed to Gov. Jeff Landry’s campaign to display a live tiger at its football games to amuse the fans,” PETA said in a release. “LSU rightly ended this idiotic, archaic practice nearly a decade ago after recognizing that it was cruel to subject a sensitive big cat to the noise, lights and crowds in a football stadium.
“Whether the tiger is confined to campus or shipped in from elsewhere, no reputable facility would subject a tiger to such chaos and stress, and PETA and nearly 50,000 of its supporters have already called on Landry to let up and leave big cats alone — and are now urging LSU to grow a spine and just say no.”
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Cory Diaz covers the LSU Tigers for The Daily Advertiser as part of the USA TODAY Network. Follow his Tigers coverage on Twitter: @ByCoryDiaz. Got questions regarding LSU athletics? Send them to Cory Diaz at bdiaz@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Daily Advertiser: PETA responds to LSU having live tiger at LSU-Alabama football game
