December 27, 2007

Cue the lawsuits

That explains a great deal:

A wall that separated the public from the San Francisco Zoo's tigers is nearly 6 feet lower than initially reported -- and nearly 4 feet lower than industry standards -- the zoo's director said Thursday. ...

The wall, he said, is 12 and a half feet, not 18 feet.

I don't find it at all implausible that a motivated tiger could jump up 12 feet, or at least high enough to hook its front paws on the top of a 12-foot wall, and scramble up the rest of the way.

The SF Zoo better have a lot of liability insurance; they're going to need it.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, this being California, I saw a picture somewhere of a woman carrying a sign protesting the killing of the tiger. Never mind that it was in the process of mauling a man, and that it charged police officers, when they tried to distract it, with clear and obvious intent to kill them too. People don't matter, only animals matter donchaknow...

I wish I could find that picture again. It was on a blog somewhere.

UPDATE: Ha! Found it!

She says she wished they'd tranquilized it instead. Apparently she thinks the cops were supposed to stand and watch the tiger kill the man it was on top of while they waited for someone to bring the special gun that fires tranquilizer darts.

...but you see, tigers are endangered but there are a lot of humans. We can spare a few, you know. Just as long as it isn't anyone I know...

UPDATE: More info now on what happened:

Police said Kulbir Dhaliwal was the animal's first victim.

As the tiger clawed and bit him, Sousa and the younger brother yelled in hopes of scaring it off him, police said. The cat then went for Sousa, slashing his neck as the brothers ran to a zoo cafe for help.

After killing the teenager, the tiger followed a trail of blood left by Kulbir Dhaliwal about 300 yards to the cafe, where it mauled both men, police said.

Four officers who had already discovered Sousa's body then arrived and found the cat sitting next to one of the bloodied brothers, police Chief Heather Fong said. The victim yelled, "Help me! Help me!" and the animal resumed its attack, Fong said.

The officers used their patrol car lights to distract the tiger, and it turned and began approaching them, leading all four to open fire, killing the animal, she said.

UPDATE: What would we do without the Chronicle? (Via)

Experts say that the depth of the moat and height of the walls could have a large impact on the animal's ability to escape the enclosure.

Man, them experts know everything! Good thing we got 'em, ain't it?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 07:51 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 468 words, total size 3 kb.

1 I know Ace had it (though it was one of his quasi-co-bloggers that posted it).

Posted by: Will at December 27, 2007 07:52 PM (E3UGR)

2 I don't know, if its true the men had been sneaking into the enclosure to throw rocks at the tiger, I'd have been inclined to wait until the tiger finished, and then shoot him only when he actually menaced someone whose *not* a Darwin Award candidate. . .

Posted by: metaphysician at December 27, 2007 08:10 PM (KVPNK)

3

The SF police say there's no evidence of anything like that happening. I think that was a zoo official CYA'ing. The evidence was a muddy footprint on the fence rail there; it could have been anyone, at any time, and there's no evidence inside the enclosure of anything like that.

The CYAer tried to claim that one of the men had his legs dangling down, and the tiger used that to scramble up the otherwise-unclimbable wall. But that's not what would have happened. If the tiger had jumped and gotten its claws into a man's leg, the man would have fallen into the enclosure and been killed there. Or if the tiger had managed to use that to pull itself up to the edge, there's no way the man would have himself gotten back over the fence and a long way away from the enclosure before the tiger reached him and killed him.

That theory is idiocy, and the CYAer should be canned for it. (Or sued for libel.) "Our zoo is perfectly safe; if anyone got killed by a tiger here it must have been their own fault, because it surely could not have been anything wrong with our perfectly safe zoo, where this is the second major attack by a tiger in two years." Bah.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 27, 2007 08:32 PM (+rSRq)

4

I may have spoken too soon. It seems they are investigating a footprint.

But I still don't buy the theory of "climbing a leg" mainly because the person who owned the leg wouldn't have ended up outside the fence.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 27, 2007 08:50 PM (+rSRq)

5 I used to spend a lot of time at that zoo, often taking pictures of the lions and tigers. I recall the moat being much deeper than 12 feet, which means they're talking about the wall above the enclosure (seen in the background here; I don't know if I have any wide-angle pictures that show its height).

Metaphysician, they couldn't have snuck into the enclosure. At best, they could reach through the fence, putting them a good 30 feet away from the tigers (horizontally or vertically). You're so far away from them that I had to bring one of my big telephoto lenses just to get full-body shots.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at December 27, 2007 09:51 PM (2XtN5)

6

Someone from the American Zoo Association said this: "Until this incident, there had not been a visitor fatality resulting from an animal escape at an AZA-accredited zoo."

He phrased that very carefully. A man was killed by a lion at the Portland zoo about 30 years ago. He got drunk, snuck into the zoo after hours, and climbed into the lion area, where one of the lions found him and killed him.

For obvious reasons, I don't have any sympathy for anyone who goes to that amount of effort to be idiotic.

But a couple of weeks later, someone else snuck into the zoo after hours with a rifle and shot that lion dead. I think they never found out who it was.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 27, 2007 10:49 PM (+rSRq)

7 There's more going on in this story than meets the eye. Police are reporting that the two friends of the deceased that were involved are being "less than forthcoming" about what was going on. It is a shame that the tiger had to die, it's a beautiful animal... but I have no problem with putting an animal down if necessary (and this was necessary). As for loony protesters... we're thick with them down here. And yes, in their minds animals are equal to people (if not a bit more important). Seeing that kind of response isn't surprising here. A few months back the city had to put down a pair of coyotes that were living in Golden Gate Park which attacked a dog being walked (on leash) in the park! It turns out some bleeding heart had been feeding these coyotes, making them less fearful of humans, and thereby more aggressive. You can see the outcry in the comments from this article in the San Francisco Comical... uh I mean Chronicle. Meanwhile across the bay we have environ-"mental"-ists sitting in trees trying to keep UC from cutting them down (even though UC planted them there, on their own property 30 years ago).

Posted by: madmike at December 28, 2007 09:13 AM (o+iiH)

8

are being "less than forthcoming"

The guys are doped to the gills on pain relievers and are currently undergoing megadoses of antibiotics. If I were in that kind of shape, the last thing I'd want to do is be grilled by a hostile police detective.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 28, 2007 10:10 AM (+rSRq)

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