Animal Encounters

[Raellus]

TIL I learned that there are more tigers in captivity in the USA than there are in the wild, combined, in the rest of the world.

As of 2006, there were an estimated 12,000 Tigers in the US (4,000 in Texas alone)- the vast majority of these animals in the hands of private owners! Add in African lions and hybrid 'Ligers' and that number goes even higher.

In a T2k scenario, it's likely that a lot of private owners would not be able to take care of their big cats. Many will starve to death, or be put out of their misery, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility that quite a few lions and tigers and bears, etc., will get loose (especially in the chaos following the TDM)- it happens more than you might think, IRL.

The point that I'm getting at is that encounters with Tigers and other big cats in the CONUS would not be terribly unrealistic. Has anyone encountered big cats in a game?

What Ref hasn't thrown a pack of feral dogs at their players? Or wolves? Inspired by stories of "Hogzilla", I threw a huge feral pig at my players in a campaign set in Arkansas. I also created a travelling merchant NPC whose caravan featured a camel he rescued from a zoo in Poland. The players encountered it during a winter snow storm.

What animal encounters have you designed, as a Ref, or played through as a PC?

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