Further Adventures of Man vs. Nature and Man vs. Man

Big-cat experts say a determined tiger could get over 12 1/2-foot wall

Well, duh! The Rick Peterson of Cats is about 18 pounds of chubby furhood and easily leaps six feet. Even an overweight tiger can, I’m sure, handle 12.5 feet.

On “Good fences make good neighbors.”:

judie4mets commented: What a horrific story. I feel so sorry for the families of the victims.

One of my aunts has a cat who is fairly old but he can leap from the floor to the top of a shelf, about 5′. And not from a running start. He’ll just be sitting or standing on the floor and with one motion he is on top the shelf. I read one news story that said tigers in zoos are not as physcially conditioned as tigers in the wild, but still. A 16′4″ wall would slow one down but not stop one.

And Hawaii wrote: The tiger thing is horrible. Zoos need to be more like wild animal parks where the animals roam and the people go by in trams. Keeping a tiger fat and lazy so it is too out of shape to kill people seems to be missing the spirit of zoos.

At our zoo I went on a tour and they explained that the gazellas can jump out easily from their pens, so what they do with the babies is encourage them to jump out once and then the zookeepers chase it back in by banging garbage lids. The poor creature gets so frightened it will never jump out again. What a security system, huh? I am just hoping they have a better method for the big cats. Sheesh.

I’ve read a few articles from the San Francisco Chronicle, which is naturally giving the story a higher profile than are the national media. I’m not sure if the following is true or not, but I saw it in the comments to the article I linked above:

resono: Heres news. Another tiger did jump the mote in the San Francisco zoo in the 1960’s. It was a Bengal Tiger named Mike. This story was on KRON TV Ch. 4 on Friday, the 28th. They interviewed a retired zoo worker who had pictures of Mike, the Bengal Tiger. One day to their surprise there was Mike walking along the top of the mote wall, but behind the short fence. This was the same mote/enclosure that Tatiana was in. They yelled to him to get back down and he soon jumped into his enclosure again. … Posted 12/29/2007 9:31:01 AM

Yikes.

Hawaii, are you speaking of the San Diego Zoo? That’s one of the best in the country. If they say the garbage can lid method works, I’d accept it. Of course, escaped gazelles probably won’t attack anyone. And banging garbage can lids would probably just irritate tigers.

Browsing through the comments of the various Chronicle articles I was rather surprised at how judgemental some people are regarding the tiger incident. From what I’ve read on the Chronicle Web site, nothing has been confirmed about the victims taunting the tiger or if they went to the zoo together or simply happened to meet there. Yet many commenters have written that the victims went to the zoo to make trouble, deserved what they got (although there seems to be some evidence that Carlos Sousa, Jr., the young man who was killed, distracted the tiger from the other two victims and possibly saved their lives), and that the two survivors are “gangsters,” “gangbangers,” and “thugs.” Boy, talk about jumping to conclusions. OK, the two survivors have had previous scrapes with the law, but how this makes them “gangsters” is beyond me. Certainly, their uncooperative stance with the police might reflect their culpability in the incident. But as DP said after Sean Taylor’s murder, it’s best to let the story play out and get all the facts before passing judgement. I think people watch too many cop shows on tv and want everything to wrap up after about an hour.

It’s also disconcerting that some commenters are pulling out the race card, mentioning that the victims liked hip-hop music and that the two survivors are of Indian descent and therefore have no regard for the norms of America. Geez Louise! Whatever happened to logic and critical reasoning? In listening to the DP Show it was surprising to me how often people play the race card. I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised anymore.