And it comes out

[urbpan]

Sorry I jumped to blame the victim, but it appears I was right.

Okay, so the wall was four feet shorter than the AZA recommendations state. It still took 60 years for someone to be obnoxious enough to annoy the tiger into jumping out.

Here's where the zoo is really culpable: these three guys apparently drunkenly roamed the zoo taunting animals conspicuously enough for zoo guests to report it, for some amount of time, without security throwing them out. But once again, it was Christmas day, and I imagine they were short staffed.

When someone dies for a stupid reason, there's enough blame to go around for everyone.

Comments

[bellisaurius.livejournal.com]

In an older, more civilized time, we would be talking about object lessons; how we should be careful around wildlife, and the importance of appropriate behavior, as opposed to talking about culpability.

[kryptyd.livejournal.com]

A similar(ish) thing happened at Dublin zoo recently where a drunken girl had her arm ripped off by a tiger. I don't think anything came of it apart from a lot of tut-tutting about the girl and the odd idiot on the radio yelling about how "that tiger should be shot!". The tiget wasn't shot.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2006/0712/zoo.html
Ahh, here's a link. It appears I may have been being "colourful" with regard to the arm being ripped actually off.

Sigh...

[gythiawulfie.livejournal.com]

Well it is good the truth is coming out. I hope the Zoo changes some of it's policies and proceedures and starts to upgrade their habitats.

AND I know that at one point, the Metro Zoo in Miami had bullet proof plexiglass enclosure between the people and the moat, on top of a small low voltage electric rail on the other side of that glass. However, after Andrew I don't recall seeing some of that down there. (Alot of the zoo is still being repaired.)

[sin-agua.livejournal.com]

I was extremely suspicious when I heard the victims' gender and ages. I didn't believe this animal just went to all this trouble over nothing.

Young people + alcohol + assholish behavior = comeuppance/death.

I'm just sad the tiger in this case was killed. As far as I'm concerned, it was self-defense and the young men should have to pay to buy the zoo another Siberian tiger.

Taunting children and animals: two things I just can't abide.

[ndozo.livejournal.com]

I agree that people shouldn't taunt zoo animals. But it's just some form of karma that the people who actually were injured/killed were the ones teasing the cat. Once that tiger got out it could have chomped on anyone. It is completely the responsibility of the zoo to be sure that dangerous animals can never escape their enclosures, no matter what: If lightning strikes right next to them, if a bee stings them, if stupid people taunt them, they should never be able to get out to where people are. It's foolish to think that no one will tease a caged animal. It's a macho, dumbass thing that happens all the time. Some people think that animals don't belong in zoos at all and that that is the first mistake in this sad situation. Plus, this tiger had already bitten someone. Maybe it liked the taste. To my mind, getting drunk and teasing a zoo animal shouldn't be a capital crime. Chances are the kid that was killed would have grown out of it and been a perfectly fine man. Taking satisfaction in his death is creepy. And sin_agua, if the "death" part of your equation was correct, there would be far, far fewer people walking this planet.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

You were right. I still think you were jumping to conclusions a bit, but clearly not without reason. :-)

It also seems to me that they (and 911) also screwed up by not responding more quickly when they received reports of a tiger attack. I can understand their skepticism, but in this case it seems that prudence should have dictated a swift response first and recriminations afterward. Very sad.

[teratologist.livejournal.com]

Now I'm just mad at the zoo for not being well designed enough to protect animals from people at the hundred-year asshole high-water mark, is all.

[teratologist.livejournal.com]

After further thought, I find it interesting that so many people are attributing the debacle at the San Francisco Zoo to some kind of modern softness. A bit of observation suggests that a predilection for doing stupid things to potentially fatal animals is a trait that is expressed in the human phenotype regularly even in the absence of emergency room doctors and personal injury lawyers, and thus cannot be attributed to modern decadence at all.