While coitus is a behavior and the tiger a being, together they represent two fates of plants' prodigious reserves. The tiger is poised atop a pyramid of global nutrition whose base is the sun. Even at rest, the tiger represents life's nutritional edge, its carnivorous limit. The economy comes from photosynthetic life and the sun. Photosynthesizers use solar radiation to produce the cold hard cash of the biosphere.
Heat is dissipated, degraded energy lost to space as primordial wealth accumulates.
Spending has always been a critical problem for life. Greed comes easily within a biosphere whose constituency triumphs as a function of ability to amass the wealth of photosynthesis. Bataille's tiger mercilessly hunts the leaf-eating deer. North Americans now fell trees to print paper money with colored fibers - or submit such bills in return for the striped pelt of that endangered mammal. Photosynthesis creates excess, surplus, a reserve of matter and energy whose uses are as numberless as life is creative.