Tiger in Hampshire

“In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen,” true, one would have to agree with My Fair Lady’s meteorologist here, but my guess is that both Henry Higgins and Eliza would have been startled by the tale of a white tiger in Hampshire. So were the authorities. The police leapt into action, contacted the nearby zoo, sent observers and launched a helicopter.

The first indication that the said white tiger might not have been exactly what the police imagined came when the helicopter observation team reported that the tiger had no heat signature and, suspiciously, did not move. Then, the wind blew it over; we know that there are no hurricanes in Hampshire, so finally the white tiger team must have realised that the animal was a stuffed toy.

The entire story, reported in The Guardian, is completely bizarre. First, the panic. How come that it never occurred to anyone that a real live white tiger was wholly unlikely to be sitting in a Hampshire field? Then, the overreaction. A helicopter with heat-reading equipment, significant police presence, tranquillising darts, involvement by the local zoo and much else all point to the assumption made by the authorities that, yes, white tigers do hang out in Hampshire and this must be taken very, very seriously indeed.

My guess is that those who have spent time in India simply don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the absence of common sense on the part of those involved. Safety culture, backed up by the Health and Safety Executive, have created a climate in which people are terrified of their own shadows and will run to authority at the first sign of anything untoward. They can’t handle it themselves and appear to have abandoned agency, with relief. After all, if there is no agency, they might surmise, then there is no need to assume responsibility either.

I recall a trip on the Budapest metro some years ago when a young man boarded the train with a falcon on his wrist. No one batted an eyelid. A falconer with a falcon is hardly the commonest sight in Budapest, though others have seen the pair too, but the passengers, all Hungarian presumably, behaved with the sangfroid proverbially attributed to the English. I suspect that if there had been Brits on the train, they would have broken out in a fit of screaming heebie-jeebies. After all, they were thoroughly frightened by a stuffed white tiger in Hampshire.

Sch. Gy