We’re Bringing Tigers Back to the Arenas

Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, used to have a tiger. Up until 2015, Louisiana State University’s endangered feline mascot, Mike, would be in attendance for home football games, paraded around the stadium before kickoff in a white-and-yellow cage pulled by a Chevrolet Silverado.

Cheerleaders would sit on top of the cage, waving their pom-poms at the crowd (capacity: 102,000). But his main duty, since you couldn’t really see him inside the cage, was to produce a roar. One way or another, his handler would agitate Mike enough to get the tiger to howl into a microphone to frighten LSU’s opponents, embolden the purple and gold, and raise Mike’s cortisol levels. When the sixth version of Mike (his name was Mike VI) died of cancer in 2016, the university decided to end the practice. This left lucky Mike VII, a Siberian-Bengal hybrid, to lounge about in his 15,000-square-foot habitat on campus.

But this weekend, for a much-anticipated SEC match-up against Alabama, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry wants to bring in a real tiger to stave off the Crimson Tide. For months, Landry’s been saying that he wants to get a big cat back in the mix — he reportedly talked over the idea of bringing Mike back with the state surgeon general, who is both a veterinarian and a physician and who is named Oliver Garden.

But LSU said it would not allow Mike VII back in Tiger Stadium. So Landry came up with a different plan, which leaked this week when state senator Bill Wheat told the Louisiana Illuminator that there would be a tiger on hand for the nationally televised game on Saturday night — and, he said, “It’s not Mike.”

Baton Rouge’s ABC affiliate WBRZ reports that Landry went to a reliable source for exotic animals: central Florida. A tiger owner named Mitchel Kalmanson is providing his cat, a Bengal named Omar Bradley, who is named after the first-ever chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

Kalmanson, who did not respond to questions, is an insurance man by trade. On his website, he offers coverage for commercial pedicabs, circus liability insurance, animal mortality coverage for exotic pets, specialty insurance “covering the wild from alligators to zebras,” police liability insurance, and insurance for dogs with a “history of dog bites and/or violence.” (“I will probably insure almost every risk,” Kalmanson told Good Morning America in 2018.) He also runs a company called Featuring Animals, which provides exotic pets for TV productions and “special events,” such as LSU games that the school’s own tiger is not allowed to attend.

This may come as a surprise, but PETA is not a fan of Mitchel Kalmanson. In fact, he has his own fact sheet, in which the feisty animal-rights organization lists his many alleged failures to follow USDA regulation. There are some very sad details alleged in the fact sheet involving big-cat diets and small cages. There are also some funny ones, like the two separate events about 20 years ago in which tigers escaped from a circus due to “employee errors.”

There was also the event in May of this year, in which Kalmanson allegedly tried to supply Rick Ross with four tigers for a car show in Georgia, a plan that was scrapped due to county laws about displaying wild animals.

Tune in tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. to find out if the governor gets his scab tiger to roar — or if the cat makes a successful break for freedom.