THE LADY AND HER TIGER
By
An unusual book by an unusual lady who makes an excellent case for preferring animals to people. She is most known for the Lincoln-Mercury cougar commercials, but the endless TV episodes and ads (which she still feels guilty about) were merely the means to pay for the upkeep of the small zoo she and her ex-husband could not help collecting. Lions, tigers, wolves, bears, elephants, wallabies, deer, seals, pelicans--anything that could walk or crawl or swim or fly found arms that would feed an abandoned infant with an eye-dropper, or massage injured hindquarters for hours, or slowly teach a motherless elephant to swing its trunk. The author, who abjures the whip and the ""hot rod"" (an electrified stick) for the rather zen method of ""becoming the animal,"" blames only humans for the maulings their supposedly ""domestic"" wild animals occasionally give them: it is our fault for supposing a chimp or a lion cub could ever adjust itself to living in a four-walled apartment. Yet this is basically not a polemic but a book about a very special kind of love and the creatures who give us more of it than we deserve.