Fatal Attractions (TV series)
Fatal Attractions is a recurring documentary series on Animal Planet. First aired in 2010, the show focused on humans who have kept animals as unconventional pets that have turned out to be dangerous and sometimes fatal. This program held a TV-14 rating due to the disturbing content in each episode. Premise. Each episode dealt with either a species (chimpanzee, tiger) or a class (reptiles, big cats) of animals—referred to in the show as "exotic"—not normally regarded as domesticated pets. Generally, two or three stories about a person whose relationships with these animals turned tragic are  intertwined. Each story within an episode was told through flashbacks and re-enactments, narrated by actress Jana Sheldon. Subject-matter experts (SMEs), along with family members and surviving attack victims, excluding deceased attack victims were interviewed as part of the narrative. Episodes. A three-episode miniseries premiered in March 2010 served as the pilot for the series. Animal Planet ordered an additional four episodes, which began airing in October 2010. Another order was placed for four more episodes, which began airing in February 2011. Each episode deals with two or three stories of people who keep animals as pets that  are generally not meant to live in domestic environments and often are hostile to mankind in general. Episodes explore how these owners come to develop a psychological dependence on these animals, to the point of allowing themselves to get so close to these animals that the line between predator and prey becomes blurred or even non-existent. Episodes usually depict someone getting hurt or killed as a result of keeping exotic species as household pets. Each story is tied together at the end, as part of the overall theme of why wild animals should remain in the wild and not  in backyards. Many episodes deal with high-profile animal attack cases, such as the February 2009 mauling of Charla Nash by Travis, a 14-year-old chimpanzee who had lived as a pet for his entire life with Connecticut businesswoman Sandra Herold. Others deal with high-profile animal seizures, such as the finding of Ming, a Bengal tiger living in a Harlem apartment. Occasionally, the subject-matter experts (SME for short) being interviewed for an episode relate first-hand stories of animal attraction nearly turning fatal for themselves or someone close to them. A recurring theme throughout the series is  the notion that when an exotic animal attack on a human results in a fatality to the human, it almost always results in an additional fatality. The animal involved in the attack, often simply exhibiting its hard-wired instincts or prey drive, usually has to be put down as well. Experts interviewed for the show explain that sometimes the killing of the animal is to prevent it from further attacks on humans; other times, the animal is euthanized in order to retrieve the body of the victim; still others are killed as routine legal procedure, applied to any animal that  injures or kills a human, in order to perform a necropsy and test for diseases such as rabies. Thus, the human's attraction is just as likely, if not more so, to be fatal to the animal as well.