BATON ROUGE — Gov. Jeff Landry called out LSU's football team for its 42-13 loss against Alabama over the weekend, saying that the only tiger who showed up was "our live tiger," referring to a Bengal tiger he helped bring in from Florida to revive a tradition of bringing a live tiger into Death Valley during football games, NOLA.com reported.

“I’m going to tell you something. This is about tradition. And the thing about tradition is about respecting those who came before you,” Landry said during a comedic Monday night event — “Politics with a Punch" — in Metairie.

Landry and his office said that the comments were made in jest and that he whole heartedly supports the Tigers.

Guess I’ll be getting the Trump treatment. @tegbridges, report it for what it was—a joke at a comedy event. I love LSU and 100% support our tigers!

The left should laugh more. https://t.co/UExScEg3aD

— Jeff Landry (@JeffLandry) November 12, 2024

The tiger, named Omar Bradley, was brought to be on the sidelines before the game for less than 10 minutes. The tiger, presented as Mike, is owned by a Florida man with multiple citations for animal cruelty, WBRZ reported. Landry's office told WBRZ that no state or school funds were used to pay for the tiger, leaving the source of the funds up in the air.

Landry also criticized "woke people" who opposed his revival of the tradition, something he has been fighting for since at least September. 

“I had more people come up to me, and they remembered Mike the Tiger more than some of the great plays in Tiger Stadium,” Landry said. “And they grew up as children seeing this. It’s about tradition. At the end of the day, these woke people have tried to take tradition out of this country. It’s tradition that built this country.”

The decades-old tradition was ended in 2015 amid concerns that the noise and large crowd were stressing Mike.