There’s a tiger habitat on the LSU campus now, with no tiger to inhabit it.

All there was Wednesday was a somber scene with a background soundtrack of distant traffic and the babbling of a small artificial stream that fed into the pool Mike VI used to wade through.

Long before LSU’s Bengal tiger mascot was put down Tuesday morning because of his aggressive and irreversible cancer, the well-wishes started to accumulate on the perimeter of Mike’s home. Messages hoping for a Bluegrass Miracle of a recovery amid stuffed tigers and candles and flowers. In one place, a dozen roses were wedged between two gates of the outer fence surrounding Mike’s enclosure. In another place, some multicolored and now fading flowers jammed in a Raising Cane’s plastic cup with Les Miles’ picture printed on the side.

By Wednesday afternoon the get wells were being crowded out by a rising sea of farewells, handwritten words from the hearts of Tiger fans and tiger fans.

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“You,” someone named Caroline Coon wrote, “were my ray of sunshine.”

Every archway fronting Mike’s habitat was jammed with some collection of mementos. It looked a bit like the fence outside Buckingham Palace and the piles of flowers left after Princess Diana died.

This wasn’t a person who died, but a large animal. Many people’s feelings for animals run deep, of course, but this was something more. More than just a caged beast, an object of curiosity, Mike VI for many people embodied the spirit of LSU as a school and as an athletic entity.

Part of that is gone now, and in this year of tragedy upon tragedy in Baton Rouge, dovetailed with an unsettling year of upheaval for LSU’s proud and beloved football program, it apparently reached a point that so many people were moved to come to this spot and reflect and leave something of their feelings on a warm and quiet afternoon.

The area outside Mike’s habitat has long been a touchstone in this town, a public-square-like gathering place, a type of tourist attraction. You come to Baton Rouge, the guidebooks should say, you eat the food and listen to the music and you see Mike the Tiger. And without him, nothing is quite the same.

In the 80 years LSU has kept a live mascot on its campus, this is only the second time one of the Mikes expired during football season. The other time was way back in 1956, during the midst of a six-game losing streak that marred a dismal 3-7 campaign under second-year coach Paul Dietzel. The old bromide that followed was that ’56 was so bad, not even Mike the Tiger could take it. Legend has it that Mike II died of pneumonia and was surreptitiously replaced. This Mike II died in the spring of 1958, replaced by Mike III just before that championship season.

As I looked silently over the tributes and the messages, my mind kept coming back to those flowers in the Les Miles cup. I was struck by how the firing of LSU’s second-longest tenured coach ever and the death of its mascot rode along parallel tracks.

Miles became LSU’s coach in 2005. Mike VI was born in Indiana in 2005 and became LSU’s mascot two years later, the year of Miles’ only national championship.

This year, after Baton Rouge struggled through shootings and protests and floods, there was hope that this could be another great season for the city to rally around. Instead, Miles was fired, Leonard Fournette’s Heisman Trophy campaign ended before it could begin because of a lingering ankle sprain, LSU had to switch quarterbacks, and LSU’s most recent scheduled game against Florida was postponed and remains in gridiron limbo.

Now Mike VI, too? Well, for a lot of folks, it’s probably been too much to bear.

After 11 years of relative stability under Miles, with Mike VI stalking his lair across North Stadium Drive for most of them, LSU football is at its most unstable point since the late 1990s.

Ed Orgeron has done a commendable job in his two-plus weeks as interim head coach and so far has been worthy of strong consideration for the job full-time. But knowing who will lead the Tigers through the goal posts in 2017 is as unknowable now as knowing where Mike VII will come from. The only cold comfort for LSU and Mike the Tiger fans is LSU’s vow that there will be a Mike VII.

To the animal rights activists who want Mike VI to be Mike the Last, I can only say this: If you’re worried that the next tiger won’t be well-cared for, won’t be loved, then come to LSU’s campus and look at the wallpaper of tear-provoking goodbyes left by a brokenhearted people.

We should all be so lucky to be as loved as Mike the Tiger.