Justice indeed

[RetiredGySgt]

Sounds like the three "victims" provoked the cat and got what they deserved.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080118/ap_on_re_us/tiger_attacks

 

[watermark]

Sounds like the three "victims" provoked the cat and got what they deserved.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080118/ap_on_re_us/tiger_attacks

So?

You really don't think that the zoo bears any blame... for letting the fucking tiger out? You take "personal responsbility" (the responsibility to avoid acts of God) to a ridiculous extreme. Not all situations are black and white.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

So?

You really don't think that the zoo bears any blame... for letting the fucking tiger out? You take "personal responsbility" (the responsibility to avoid acts of God) to a ridiculous extreme. Not all situations are black and white.

The Zoo didn't "let" the tiger out. It was so provoked it leaped a moat and a barrier that experts say it shouldn't have been able to leap.

 

[indago]

It's amazing what man or animal can do when entirely focused...

 

[jillian]

So?

You really don't think that the zoo bears any blame... for letting the fucking tiger out? You take "personal responsbility" (the responsibility to avoid acts of God) to a ridiculous extreme. Not all situations are black and white.

No one knows how high tigers can jump. All estimates are based on what's been seen before. These people so agitated the cat that it got adrenalized and jumped. Basically, it was being a tiger. It's not that anyone deserved to die, but these morons shouldn't have provoked it. Because of them a beautiful animal had to be killed... for absolutely no reason.

 

[maineman]

neither the teenaged victim, nor the tiger "deserved" to die. The teenager was being a stupid teenager, and the tiger was just being a tiger.

If all teenagers who do boneheaded stupid things "deserved" to die, homo sapiens would soon be extinct.

and if all tigers didn't act like tigers, they would have been extinct long ago.

 

[Steerpike]

neither the teenaged victim, nor the tiger "deserved" to die. The teenager was being a stupid teenager, and the tiger was just being a tiger.

If all teenagers who do boneheaded stupid things "deserved" to die, homo sapiens would soon be extinct.

and if all tigers didn't act like tigers, they would have been extinct long ago.

Exactly.

 

[AllieBaba]

neither the teenaged victim, nor the tiger "deserved" to die. The teenager was being a stupid teenager, and the tiger was just being a tiger.

If all teenagers who do boneheaded stupid things "deserved" to die, homo sapiens would soon be extinct.

and if all tigers didn't act like tigers, they would have been extinct long ago.

Actually, the tiger did need to be destroyed. You can't have a tiger that has killed in a situation where it has to be handled by people every day.

And it's the responsibility of the zoo to make sure the animals CAN'T get to the visitors. I've heard of tigers leaping 30 feet and I imagine the specialists who advise the zoo or work for them have, too.

The zoo should have to pay the bills, but as far as wrongful death, let a jury decide.

 

[jillian]

Actually, the tiger did need to be destroyed. You can't have a tiger that has killed in a situation where it has to be handled by people every day.

And it's the responsibility of the zoo to make sure the animals CAN'T get to the visitors. I've heard of tigers leaping 30 feet and I imagine the specialists who advise the zoo or work for them have, too.

The zoo should have to pay the bills, but as far as wrongful death, let a jury decide.

First of all, read my last post... no one knows how high a tiger can jump. There is a monorail at the Bronx Zoo and no tiger's gotten to it yet. But that doesn't mean it can't. They make best estimates based on the knowledge at hand. The only alternative is for zoos to cage them, which I think is cruel. They do better out on exhibit.

As for "you can't have a tiger that's killed in a situation where it has to be handled by people every day". That's simply wrong. No one "handles" a tiger, in a zoo or otherwise. They exist simply to kill. My husband was a large mammal keeper at the Bronx Zoo for 8 years. The tigers were fed through sliding trays that would be opened and the food placed inside. On one particular day a tiger reached a single claw through and tore the steel toe off of my husband's boot. These animals do not mess around. The survival time in a cage with a tiger is listed as "zero" in their exhibits... which means it's the amount of time it takes the tiger to get to you.

They had no choice but to kill the tiger because it could have killed another 10 or 20 people before a sedative kicked in.

 

[AllieBaba]

Jill, You really are a moron. I said I'd heard of tigers leaping 30 feet...which means that somewhere they can do it. Which means the zoos should make sure they have barriers of 30 feet at least. It wasn't an assertion that I knew how far they could jump.

And people do handle cats every day in zoos. People work the gates, they feed them, they doctor them..and they occasionally get grabbed and hurt, even by the cats who haven't proven they're committed to killing.

And why would I read your last post, or any of your posts? Typically they're argumentative with very little substance to offer. Case in point, above.

 

[jillian]

Jill, You really are a moron. I said I'd heard of tigers leaping 30 feet...which means that somewhere they can do it. Which means the zoos should make sure they have barriers of 30 feet at least. It wasn't an assertion that I knew how far they could jump.

And people do handle cats every day in zoos. People work the gates, they feed them, they doctor them..and they occasionally get grabbed and hurt, even by the cats who haven't proven they're committed to killing.

And why would I read your last post, or any of your posts? Typically they're argumentative with very little substance to offer. Case in point, above.

Well, I tried to educate you. And did so rather politely.

But given you're a total loser, I figure that was probably pointless.

And, word of advice, you calling anyone else a moron is really quite amusing.

 

[AllieBaba]

Please don't try to educate, Jillian. Particularly when you have no idea what you're talking about.
Which is pretty much all the time.

 

[Steerpike]

Maybe you're the one who doesn't know what they're talking about, Allie.

The most was 15 feet, the wall 20 feet. Using a^2 + b^ = c^2 you get a distance of 25 feet in length, 20 of which is vertical in height.

Tiger experts who have since commented on the attack said the leap was virtually impossible. One postulated that adrenaline may caused the tiger to make what would normally be an unexpected leap.

Another expert on tigers said, in the news, that she didn't even believe the tiger made the leap, and that she thought it escaped from its enclosure in some other manner. That's how improbable the leap was.

So since these people are experts on tigers, and you don't appear to know anything other than some vague "I heard they can leap 30 feet" (which is probably a horizontal leap if you even heard it and aren't making it up) I think their opinion holds more weight than you.

I "heard" aliens from the Orion constellation came to earth and started a civilization in Egypt and built a face on Mars, but me having 'heard' it doesn't exactly lend credence to it, now does it?

 

[AllieBaba]

Cats are adrenaline tanks, all the time.

I watched a documentary on tigers not very long ago. It was the one where the family raised a couple of tigers on a compound..I think in India.

They showed the tigers leaping between buildings, and narrated that it was 30 feet.

I'm an animal junkie. Like I said, I don't think the zoo did anything blatantly wrong, but I was surprised that the barrier was so small, given what I know about cats. I've no doubt that there will be more experts who come forward to say, "virtually" impossible means almost impossible...which means it was possible. And the barrier was (obviously) not big enough, or the kid wouldn't be dead.

You can argue just to argue all you want. The fact is, the barrier wasn't big enough. This wasn't a super cat. It was just a cat. The boys didn't do anything spectacular, they were just kids. And most people who go to zoos believe it is truly (not virtually) impossible for the animals to get out of their confines by just jumping.

"In the wild, tigers can leap as high as 5 m (16 ft) and as far as 9–10 m (30–33 ft), making them one of the highest-jumping mammals (just slightly behind cougars in jumping ability)."

That's from Wikipedia. Given that, I think it would behoove zoos to make sure the barriers were quite a bit larger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger

 

[Steerpike]

30 feet between buildings is one thing, Allie. This is a 20 foot vertical wall at the end.

Try this experiment in your back yard:

Mark out a ten foot section of yard, get a running start, then jump. You can probably clear it.

Now put up a 10 foot wall, and mark out a spot just under 5 feet from the wall. Then getting a running start. You should only have to jump around 10 feet (maybe a foot or so more) to leap onto the top of the wall.

Think you can make the second leap? Can you even come close to making the second leap? No.

There's a big difference in a horizontal 30 foot leap and even a 25-foot leap onto the top of a 20 foot vertical wall. That's the leap the experts are saying the tiger unexpectedly made.

 

[AllieBaba]

The experiment was made, and the kid lost.

The fact is, if a cat can jump 30 feet across, I would guess that if it's motivated, it could probably jump that far straight up.

I've seen domesticated cats jump 5 feet straight up in the air..they couldn't jump any further than that across.

And the way and the how of a human jump is way different than the way and how of a cat jump.

The fact is, they gambled and lost...and they didn't provide for the maximum jumps tigers have been known to make, and they should have.

 

[Steerpike]

The kids were stupid.

As for the zoo - with all these experts saying the tiger couldn't be expected to make that jump, I simply can't adopt your viewpoint. Hindsight is always 20/20, but if there was no reason to know the tiger could have made the jump then I don't think the zoo is at fault.

And regardless of how humans v. tigers jump, the fact is it takes any animal a lot more force to make that vertical jump than the horizontal jump. Unless you can show that it was known (or should have been) that the tiger can make that vertical leap, then the zoo isn't at fault. Showing a horizontal leap won't cut it.

Jack Hana, who is on TV a lot with animals, said he thinks it got out some other way.

If what you are saying it so obviously true, then none of these experts, who have no affiliation with the zoo and nothing to gain or lose, would be saying the leap was unexpected or shouldn't have been possible.

Unless there's some grand zoo conspiracy - I'll look into that. Maybe the Illuminati arranged for knowledge of this type of leap to be lost, and somehow they overlooked the source that you heard. Better sleep with one eye open...

 

[AllieBaba]

All kids are stupid, and zoos market to kids.

If I knew a cat could jump 30 feet, then the zoo did. I wouldn't build a fence for tigers that was that small, and I wouldn't expect a zoo to assume a cat in captivity would never be able to jump as far as other cats have been recorded jumping.

When I saw Jack Hanna the day after it happened, he wasn't saying that. He was saying they are big powerful animals, and he believed the zoo was reasonable, but that cats are extraordinary and dangerous.

 

[Steerpike]

None of that contradicts the rest of what Hana said. Yes, the cats are extraordinarily dangerous. That doesn't translate to knowing they could make this leap.

We've already discussed horizontal v. vertical leaps. You say if you knew it the zoo should have known it. My point is, you didn't know it. You are misinterpreting what you say and equating the two jumps. You're using hindsight to say the zoo should have known.

I disagree.

I'll change to your viewpoint as soon as I see something indicating the zoo should have known the tiger could make this vertical leap.

 

[AllieBaba]

As I thought, there are experts who don't think the barrier was big enough, given what is known about the cats.

I'm not half as stupid as Jillian would like to believe. And I'm certainly more intelligent than she is.

Big-cat experts say a determined tiger could get over 12 1/2-foot wall
Erin Allday, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, December 29, 2007

FULL COVERAGE
Big-cat experts say a fully grown tiger could very likely climb the 12 1/2-foot moat wall at the San Francisco Zoo, especially if there were little or no water in the moat.

"That height would be scalable," said Ronald Tilson, director of conservation at the Minnesota Zoo, who since 1987 has been overseeing the tiger species survival plan of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

"A tiger cannot leap over something like that, but what it can do is stand up and with a little hop or jump, more than likely get its paws on the ledge," Tilson said. "That would not be much of a trick. And they are so powerful that they can scoot themselves up."

Authorities still don't know exactly how Tatiana, a 4-year-old Siberian tiger, escaped from her enclosure at the zoo on Christmas Day before fatally attacking one teenager and mauling two other young men.

But Tilson said the height of the wall protecting the public from the tigers "gives a reasonable explanation that the tiger got out from that spot." The recommended standard height for tiger enclosures is 16.4 feet.

It's not clear how far Tatiana could stretch her body when standing on her hind legs, but big-cat experts said it's not unusual for tigers to be able to stretch to 10 feet or more. Tigers can also hop from their hind legs as much as 3 or 4 feet in the air.

"I'm 6 feet tall, and when we have a tiger stand up, they tower over me," said Scott Lope, director of operations at Big Cat Rescue, a sanctuary with more than 100 felines in Tampa, Fla. "They're easily able to stretch to 8 feet, and with a reach and an easy 4- or 5-foot jump, they've already spanned that distance.

"Nobody's measured exactly how far or how high they can jump," he said. "But this was a young, healthy animal. It could have jumped quite high, and if the wall was not a smooth surface it could get a clawhold."

Sources have told The Chronicle that Tatiana's rear claws showed signs of wear that could support the theory that the tiger used her rear legs to climb the wall. Authorities have not ruled out the possibility that one of the victims dangled an arm or leg over the wall and that Tatiana latched onto the limb to pull herself out. But big-cat experts said she wouldn't have needed that extra leverage to climb over the wall.

Water in the moat could keep a tiger from climbing a wall, but it would have to be deep enough that the tiger's paws couldn't touch the bottom, Tilson said. The moat in the San Francisco Zoo enclosure is dry, which tiger experts said is not uncommon in zoo exhibits.

Unlike domestic house cats, tigers like water and will wade or swim in it if they can, big-cat experts said.

While there's little doubt that a tiger could escape over a 12 1/2-foot wall, experts said that thousands of the animals are kept in enclosures protected by walls roughly the same height, and yet they never escape. It's clear, they said, that something provoked Tatiana to climb the wall.

"The problem is not necessarily a 12-foot wall. I know tigers around the world that are perfectly safe behind 10-foot or 12-foot walls," said Martine Colette, founder of the Wildlife WayStation refuge for wild and exotic animals in Southern California. "The problem is the stimulus. There had to have been a tremendous stimulus that made the tiger react the way she did. If the wall was 20 feet tall, she still would have made the attempt."

While zoo officials have said that they suspect the tiger may have been taunted, police have regularly said they have no proof of that.

E-mail Erin Allday at [email protected].

This article appeared on page A - 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle