Pi reflects on a zookeeping maxim: the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man. He explains how visitors harm animals by feeding them foreign objects, giving them inappropriate food that causes illness, stealing them, or directly attacking and tormenting them; Pondicherry Zoo is spared the worst extremes but still suffers thefts, stone-throwing, and dangerous “helpful” feeding.

Pi adds that Pi’s father believes an even more dangerous creature exists: Animalus anthropo-morphicus, the animal imagined through sentimental human eyes as “cute” and “friendly.” Pi argues that both the sentimental view and the hateful view turn animals into mirrors of ourselves, and he learned the truth—an animal is essentially separate from humans—through two hard lessons, one involving Pi’s father and one later involving Richard Parker.

One Sunday morning, Pi’s father summons Pi and Ravi with unusual gravity, with Pi’s mother present and distressed. He marches the family into the zoo before opening hours and leads them to the big-cat house, where the tiger keeper, Babu, is waiting and the patriarch tiger Mahisha is held inside.

In the humid, barred cat house, Pi’s father forces Pi and Ravi to acknowledge that tigers are dangerous and orders them never to touch or approach a tiger cage. Determined to make the warning unforgettable, Pi’s father has Babu bring in a goat, place it in the adjacent cage, and open the trapdoor between cages; Mahisha—starved for days on Pi’s father’s orders—surges through and kills the goat. Pi’s mother pulls the boys away in hysterics and angrily confronts Pi’s father, who insists the cruelty is meant to prevent Pi from ever risking a hand through the bars.

Pi’s father continues the lesson by walking the boys past other animals—bears, hippos, hyenas, orangutans, ostriches, deer, camels, swans, birds, and elephants—describing how each can maim or kill. He finally ends on a gentler note by showing that guinea pigs are not dangerous largely because they are domesticated, then releases one back to its mother. The family remains angry with Pi’s father for days, and Ravi later uses the memory to threaten Pi: “You’re the next goat!”