The following is an essay I wrote for my AP Language class a few weeks ago.

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Imagine this: It's a bright sunny day, and you decide to pay the local zoo a visit. You pay the fee, enter, and enjoy the wonderful and strange worlds of exotic animals from places like Asia, Africa, and South America. You see monkeys swinging from branch to branch, pandas placidly chewing on bamboo, and jaguars excitedly pacing back and forth in their enclosures. Then you come to the tigers. Like other park-goers, you are in awe of the ferocious beauty of these huge cats, and can't help but stare as a white tiger suddenly ambushes an orange one, and they begin to tumble and play. You take out your camera, snap a few pictures, and press the button to go back and see what you've taken. That's when you notice. The white tiger's eyes appear to be... crossed? That can't be right. You look again. No, that tiger's eyes are definitely crossed. You look up at the tiger and start to wonder why such a rare animal just so happens to be found at an everyday zoo, and at what price did his beauty come?
    Sadly, this is not the thought process that 99% of the public goes through. At a regular zoo (if it can be called that), the public is shown what they want to see: a creature that has only a one in ten thousand chance of being born in the wild, and is magically produced just for that zoo. The white tiger is not all that it seems. If a white tiger were to be born in the wild, it would not be fit to survive. Tigers evolved to have orange coats in order to blend in with their surroundings and to be able to hide from their prey. A white tiger is completely unable to hide and fend for itself, and will likely die from starvation in a matter of weeks. Because nature works in such ways, only the strongest survive, and the wild white tiger would quickly be eliminated from the gene pool. The fact that humans were even able to catch a wild white tiger was a miracle all its own.
    The sordid past of today's captive white tigers begins with the last white tiger in history to have existed before human greed decided to, essentially, screw the species over. Mohan was a white male tiger captured in India in 1951. The Maharaja owning him desired more white tigers, but failed to produce more by breeding him with a normal colored tigress. It was then the Maharaja’s brother came up with an ingenious plan: to breed Mohan with the tiger’s own daughter. This was a success, and all four of their cubs were born a glorious white. Having discovered the key, the Maharaja bred Mohan to his granddaughter-slash-daughter successively, until he died in 1969. In the meantime, Mohan’s descendants were consecutively inbred, and continued to produce white cubs. Remember children: Having incest with your brother or sister will make your kids both beautiful and smart... right?
          Though the white tigers you see performing on stage or lounging in zoos appear to be healthy and full of vitality, people rarely learn that they are the lucky ones. The real white tiger is nothing like them. Whether it’s noticeable or not, all white tigers have crossed eyes because the gene carrying their white coloring causes the optic nerve to be wired on the wrong side of their brain. Other than being cross-eyed, they are often born with debilitating deformities, such as cleft palates (a condition in which the two parts of the skull that make up the roof of the mouth are not completely joined), scoliosis, immune deficiency, mental impairments, and according to Big Cat Rescue, “the number of tigers that have to be produced and disposed of in order to fill the public’s desire to see white tigers on display is staggering.”
    Big Cat Rescue is an organization based in Tampa, Florida that is dedicated to rescuing exotic animals, most notably big cats, from abusive homes and unfit owners. Since the early nineties, the acclaimed non-profit organization has taken in and cared for hundreds of neglected big cats. They have also raised awareness of issues concerning such exotic and beautiful creatures, like the world’s greatest lie: the white tiger. Those who breed white tigers, do so out of either avarice or simply ignorance. Big Cat Rescue founder, Carole Baskin, writes, “The inbreeding results in many defects, early deaths, still births and, as could be expected, the cats are not very bright which is why they are preferred for entertainment purposes”. Prized for entertainment value, “they are far more dependant upon their masters” than the average tiger. In a perfect world, we could expect to hear some good explanations from a certain Vegas-centered mystical duo. I mean they ARE just another animal that God created especially for humans to enjoy. It leaves one to wonder; why on earth did I not hear of this sooner, and why doesn’t the rest of the public know about this?
    Quite simple. Owners of white tigers don’t want you to know about their breeding so they can make profits off of them by marketing them as an “endangered species”. Ever heard of the “Royal White Siberian Tiger”? Not a real type of tiger. Other than their horrendous record of inbreeding, white tigers deteriorate the tiger as a whole because of the defects that come with their coloring and the little-known fact that they are actually Bengal-Siberian hybrids. Rather than “saving the white tiger”, we should completely outlaw their breeding. We shouldn’t even allow people to own them for spite. Mohandas Gandhi said it best when he noted “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals”.

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If you want me to post my works cited, just say so.

If there are any changes I could make, information I need to fix, or things I could add, please say so (I'm going to have to lop off a ton of details for a scholarship, later). I was originally going to add a bit about a special on Animal Planet about the "Awesome Pawsome", a litter of four cubs born at Tiger Island, a theme park in Australia,  to a white male and an orange female (Anyone else see that?). BUT, I don't have the information or resources to prove that they were related. Tiger Island claims to be breeding the tigers to "save them". They were born to separate mothers, so they probably had the same father. Here is a link to their information page:

http://tigerace.com/dreamworld.html

Yeah, a great, safe, and **TOTALLY EFFICIENT** place for breeding and keeping tigers. I can't believe people can be that stupid.