22 Years Ago In Time

A New Yorker is attacked by the tiger he keeps as a pet in his Harlem apartment. Animal trainer and illusionist Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy is mauled onstage. Back in 1981 in a cover story CATS: LOVE 'EM! HATE 'EM! TIME warned that these furry felines may look placid but are hardly tame:

Many people believe that cats are so biologically programmed for survival in the wilderness that they cannot be trained. Asleep, a cat may resemble a throw pillow or a Kliban-style meatloaf, but, awake and hungry, the average feline, one of the most highly evolved predators in the natural world, is capable of dispatching a dozen mice at a brief sitting. Alarmingly, it tends to dawdle before administering the coup de grace. Behavioralists believe this happens because cats are programmed by a primitive, vestigial stalking mechanism. Cats toy with their prey because they may be teaching kittens to hunt or may be exhibiting their prowess; cats do not always relate killing with the need to eat. When they finally do away with a mouse, it is with Darwinian perfection. The cat's teeth are arranged to sever a rodent's spine with surgical precision. --TIME, Dec. 7, 1981