The Captain is an arrogant, abusive man who seeks to have total control and power over other loving beings. He is an animal trainer at a circus in which he coerces animals, through abusive tactics, to perform tricks for the circus audiences. The animals are expected to obey the Captain without question as they are considered to be no more than property and sources of entertainment for humans. When the Captain abusively forces the tiger to perform for the entertainment of humans, the tiger eventually chooses to fight back against his oppression and mauls the Captain to death. Through this liberating act, the tiger proves that humans can never truly conquer what is wild. The tiger also proves that those who are oppressed can fight back.
The Captain is an animal-trainer at a circus, and he treats the tiger with appalling cruelty. As with all wild animals at the circus, the tiger's expected to perform tricks for the crowd. But he's a proud animal, a wild animal whose natural habitat is in the forest; he belongs there, not in a circus. The Captain may have trained him to do tricks, but no matter how hard he tries, he’ll never be able to change the tiger into a domesticated animal.
And so it proves when, one day, the tiger turns on the Captain and brutally mauls him to death. Such behavior isn’t out of character for the tiger; he attacked and ate some of the villagers’ livestock as revenge for his family’s being killed by poachers. But as his friendship with a local monk later on in the story testifies, the tiger only does harm to those humans who do harm to him.
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