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........

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