From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2002:

Michael Palin of the British comedy team Monty Python’s
Flying Circus in 1971 inadvertently sketched how animal charities
really operate. Playing a dull accountant, Palin confessed to a job
counselor that what he really wished to be was a lion tamer. He did
not actually know a lion from an anteater, but he had a lion tamer’s
hat.
Animal protection charities are nearly always founded by
“lion tamers,” or former lion tamers anyway, who work with animals,
love animals, and are not averse to risk–including from the “killer
cats” who stalk great cities, also portrayed by Monty Python.
Among bare-armed “cat ladies,” ANIMAL PEOPLE often notes
that the most evident visual distinction between cat rescuers and the
suicidally depressed may be that self-inflicted scars on wrists are
short, neat, and horizontal, whereas the wounds from feral cats
tend to be jagged and run vertically from elbow to wrist.

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