He knelt and rubbed the goose-down fur at the base of the cub’s ears. The cub purred, impossibly docile.

He addressed the tiger like an old friend. “Those must be some good drugs they’ve got you on.”

Knight knew that the main reason no zoos in America allowed tiger experiences like this was because the tigers would make a quick meal of the patrons. Any zoo offering petting experiences—particularly with adolescent tigers—would have to be drugging the tigers, which would never be tolerated back home in the States.

A young American girl knelt beside Knight as her parents stood off to the side. She beamed at the magic of seeing the little zebra-striped creature up close with its sparkling light eyes and its paws like mittens. She began rubbing the cub’s belly vigorously.

“Do you have a dog at home?” Knight asked.

The girl nodded.

“Dogs love it when they get their bellies rubbed, don’t they?”

“Yeah, my doggie wiggles his foot when I do this,” the girl said as she scratched the cub’s stomach. “Why isn’t the tiger doing anything?”

“Cats are a little different,” Knight told her. “They like it when you pet their chin and behind their whiskers.”

The girl slid her hand under the cub’s chin and coursed her fingers through its fur. Its jaw went slack, and it meowed like a house cat.

She turned to Knight, beaming a smile of pebbly baby teeth. He returned her infectious grin, for a moment putting out of his mind the dark theories he was formulating about the true nature of this zoo.

“Do you want to know how they say hello?” Knight asked as the girl’s parents watched nearby.

The girl nodded eagerly.

“They touch foreheads.”

The girl hesitated, uncertain whether Knight was pulling her leg. He nodded for her to give it a try. She leaned her head forward until the fur tickled her skin. The tiger returned the gesture, increasing the pressure between their skulls.

Knight noticed a handler cleaning tiger feces out of the adjacent pen and spoke to him through the wire mesh that separated them. “Hey, how many tigers do you have here?”

“We have pens for two hundred, but not all of them are full right now.”

Right now. Those last two words were telling. Knight knew that unlike most wild animals, tigers were as easy to breed in captivity as rabbits. To have unused capacity at a tiger exhibit was almost unheard of, meaning that some of the cages must have been recently vacated, or they were newly constructed and Tiger Palace was scaling up its operation.

“They’re all cubs,” the girl observed as she scanned the zoo. Knight had noticed the same thing the moment he arrived. Not a single tiger on display had crossed the threshold into adulthood.

“What do you think they do when they get older?” she asked.