The tiger is an awesome beast.

I don’t use “awesome” here in the modern, informal sense that we apply casually to anything that we think is extremely good, including TV shows and lunch.

Rather, the tiger is awesome in the traditional sense described in this online definition: “extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear.”

This sense of the word connects us to a distant evolutionary past when tigers, lions, bears and crocodiles were vital elements of the dangerous wilderness that surrounded us. They were supreme predators, and we had good reason to fear them.

But we also respected and admired them. Sometimes we adopted their fangs and claws as sacred totems to help us appropriate some of their power.

Mostly, though, habitat destruction and high-powered weapons have beaten these formidable animals into retreat. Still, some of the primordial fear and awe was awakened on April 15, when lead tiger keeper Stacey Konwiser was killed at the Palm Beach Zoo by a 13-year-old Malayan tiger.

Deaths such as Konwiser’s and Dawn Brancheau’s, who was killed at SeaWorld in 2010 by the orca Tilikum, are comparatively rare. But they remind us that the notion that we can entirely understand these beasts is highly suspect, based on the mistaken and unexamined belief that their captivity is an arrangement that is cooperative and mutual. It’s not.

And these deaths ought to make us pause to consider whether in the 21st century we should still be confining behind bars animals such as lions and tigers.

Of course we have our reasons for doing so. We imagine that the opportunity to view animals in a pseudo-natural habitat will educate us and perhaps make us more concerned about the well-being of threatened species.

Sometimes we profess the “lifeboat” theory, the idea that as their natural environments diminish, species can be preserved for future generations in zoos and wildlife parks. Sometimes we even refer to captive animals as “ambassadors from their wild brethren.”

But these rationales sound pretty bogus. No animal can be an ambassador from a place it’s never been and has no hope of going. And if we’ve created serious habitat problems for species as a whole, it seems cruel to try to solve them at the expense of individual animals.

No, I suspect that if we were genuinely honest about it, we’d see that the confinement of magnificent predators such as lions, tigers, killer whales and dolphins is mostly for our amusement. And since we’re willing to pay for it, putting animals behind bars serves a profit motive.

Animal confinement is an ancient practice; at one time no worthy nobleman was without his own menagerie. As a rule, the lives of captive beasts were squalid and miserable, but zoos have evolved in a much more humane direction since the days when tigers spent all of their time in cramped cages.

Maybe it’s time to take this enlightenment a step further. Commendably, SeaWorld has agreed to stop breeding orcas in captivity and forcing them to perform. Ringling Brothers has retired its performing elephants to a refuge in Florida. Catalonia banned bullfighting in 2010. Walmart and other corporations are selling only cage-free eggs and chickens.

These positive steps are largely the result of pressure from consumers. Perhaps the animal confinement industry would respond to the public’s acceptance of the notion that the magnificence and awe of predators in the wild can never be duplicated in captivity. And that the attempt to do so comes at considerable cost to individual animals.

Now that would be awesome, indeed.

John M. Crisp, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.