The crowd gathered around the show was four people deep.

Up close it was easy to see why, the orange tent has stripes, and big black letters spelling out the word tiger.Bruno Blaszak and his assistant Jennie Courtney handled seven tigers in a gated ring at the West End Fair.Blaszak's tigers ranged from 350 to 600 pounds, with a total of 150 pounds of raw beef dinners and two and a half gallons of water for all of the cats daily.Once a week the tigers a treat of milk and raw eggs."It keeps their coats shiny. They love it," Courtney said.There are only 5,000 free roaming tigers left in the world. Most of the tiger population resides in captivity now, with Bengal tigers being the most common.Blaszak says that his "tigers are not tamed, they are trained.""We choose not to pet them or handle them too much. We respect the tigers. They are wild animals," Courtney said.The big cats, along with their trainers, travel all over the country preforming for crowds all summer.Their winters are spent on 10 acres at their Florida home. Some of the tigers get a little part-time work as Hollywood actors.Blaszak, 50, is no stranger to the ring. He spent his whole life in the circus, raised by a Ringling Brothers lion tamer, Ada Blaszak, his mother."His mother told me to love and respect the tigers," Courtney said.Even though they are wild beasts, tigers generally act like the average house cat."They lie around and sleep most of the day. But at night they are very active. You'll hear them roar in the middle of the night. They get pretty loud," Courtney said.Tigers do not purr like a content house cat. Instead they "chuff."Purring is an inhalation sound while chuffing is an exhalation almost like a deep huffing sound.This is their first performance at the West End Fair.In one part of the show, a tiger named India walks a tight rope above the crowd.Her reward is a meat treat at the end of a very long stick."The tigers have all their claws and fangs, we know our limitations," Blaszak tells the crowd."They are not pets; they would be very rough on your furniture. And your neighbors."The West End Fair continues through Saturday at the West End Fairgrounds, off Route 209 in Gilbert.