Jeez, what a bizarre story. In about 8 directions at once. Two brothers, 19 and 23, take their 17 year old buddy to the zoo. The kid’s father has the cell number of one of the brothers and calls to ask if he knows where his son is. He’s told they don’t know. In fact he was with them, at the zoo or on the way there. In a few hours, he was dead.

The two brothers were described by their neighbor across the street as being hell on wheels – loud arguments at all hours, and peeling rubber on the street regularly.

Witness accounts are sparse but indications are the young gentlemen were engaged in the time honored tradition of punks proving their courage by taunting an animal that could rip them to bits were it not behind a barrier of some sort. Of course the barrier could have been better but that’s only part of the story.

Several tiger experts have been quoted saying that tigers have an acute sense of whether or not they are being harassed. They further state that they are prone to extra normal feats of strength when provoked – tiger adrenaline, I reckon.

When police finally spotted the tiger, she was in the process of putting some hurt on one of the brothers. He was yelling “help me,” (oddly enough) and they did – distracting the tigress with their lights and then shooting her.

Not long after, the brothers reportedly were being abusive to hospital staff. Police have reported that they have been uncooperative in their investigation. One account has it that they agreed in the ambulance not to tell the police what they had been doing prior to the attack.

The father of the slain young man said on TV, with some emotion, that he wanted the two to call him and explain what happened, that he had been hearing the speculation that they had taunted the animal and he wanted the facts. This was several days ago, today in the paper he said they still haven’t spoken with him.

One can imagine that they are keeping quiet in anticipation of a major payday from public coffers for their pain and suffering, under lawyer’s orders to say nothing – all my speculation, of course.

I’m not exactly sure why this fries me so but it does.

Numerous people have known for years that the enclosure was inadequate. From the SF Chron:

And well known in zoo lore is the story about an entomologist who, as a teenage science student in the late 1950s, visited the tiger grotto with former zoo director Carey Baldwin to see if the enclosure was secure enough to contain the tiger.

"Mr. Baldwin had been told by one of the zookeepers that the tiger might be able to escape by jumping across the moat and onto the flowerbed between the public guard rail and the moat," the entomologist, David Rentz, recalled in a posting on his Web log.

"We got a large piece of meat and tied it to a long bamboo pole and approached the tiger enclosure. We were at the other end of the bamboo pole - about 15 feet away from the meat. Baldwin held the pole at the edge of our side of the moat. Once the tiger saw it, he literally flew across the moat from his position on the other side, grabbed the meat, and sprung back to the grotto all in one graceful movement.

"It happened so quickly that it was hard to believe what we had seen," Rentz said Saturday in a telephone interview from his home in Queensland, Australia. "It scared the hell out of me. It scared the hell out of both of us.

"Then Mr. Baldwin closed the tiger's access to the outside - supposedly forever," Rentz wrote on his Web log. "Notes were left to the zookeepers to never let this tiger outside again."

So the zoo director knew the barrier was inadequate in the late 50s and his response was to confine the strongest tiger indoors for life.

In the great Kurosawa movie, “Dersu Uzala,” the title character held that it was very bad luck to kill a tiger, the same species as it turns out, Siberian, as was killed in SF. Call me a flower child, but this episode points to how far removed from the natural world we have become. If you've not seen that movie, and if manly tests of courage have any appeal to you, check it out.

The whole zoo thing is screwy – having the animals available all day to the random harassment of punks. The viewing model should be changed to regular supervised tours, under the close watch of zoo-keepers, apart from which the animals would not be visible to the public.

Keepers say many people were aware of potential for tigers to escape

In ambulance, survivors of S.F. tiger attack made pact of silence

Zoos - columnist Jon Carroll

S.F. Zoo visitor saw 2 victims of tiger attack teasing lions

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Rule #1 taught in the cave about 100,000 years ago.

Son, don't f**k with the tiger.

B

It was recently reported that all of these kids were apparently high on cocaine, marijuana and alcohol (or a combination of these) when they were messing with the tiger, and that was one of the reasons they have refused to co operate with the police.

The only real winners in this one will be the attorneys who can use all this to generate fees.

I'd live to a few years ago in San Francisco, for 25 years. In that time there were only two pretty large attractions I'd neglected to visit.

One of them was the Cable Car museum.

The other was the zoo.

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X2

Bunch of punks waiting around quietly for a pain and suffering check, makes me wanna hurl.
That tiger was endangered, and its their falt it had to be killed. I say make them pay for the tiger, and the time lost to the zoo.

~Nate

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I dont care if the kids were on drugs or not, the SF ZOO should be able to keep a wild animal in its cage/area. I mean how many 5 years olds come visit the zoo and taunt the animals?

My mom is a school teacher at sanchez elementary. And went on a field trip to the sf zoo. Even she had many of her 5-6 year old students taunt the animals. But the zoo should be able to contain them.

More so they should be able to monitor the animals. The only reason the police shot the tiger was because the staff didnt know that the animal got out they had thought a fight had broken out and called the police.

I bet if 5yr old jimmy was attacked by the tiger even with taunting him everyone would be singing a different tune.

So my final word on this:

ITS A WILD ANIMAL, TAUNTED OR NOT IT SHOULD BE SAFLEY CONTAINED AND NOT ABLE TO ESCAPE.

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The guys were shat stains..I feel bad for the tiger.

Well, if the parent cannot watch the kid who does crap like that and he ends up as a tiger's dinner, why should I feel sorry? I feel sorry for the tiger who was killed.

Contain the kids? Why? If they cannot behave, don't take them out. Misbehave outside? Drag their sorry ass back to school.

Not me. He fawked with the bull and got the horns. Why would I feel sorry for him? What are these things called parents for besides popping one out of the oven? If the kid was walking along nicely and the tiger jumped out and killed him, I feel sorry for him. You were screwing with the tiger? Too bad.

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X2

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Next field trip to the zoo your mom should tell her students not to taunt animals.

How about they cancel the field trip if the brats cannot behave? Sorry, you can't behave. You get escorted back to the lovely bus and sit it out. Enough people get in the "cooler" and the trip is canceled. Well, we'd be at the zoo today but since you brats cannot behave, we can spend the zoo time sitting in a classroom.

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As much as I may agree with what you're trying to say...

There's just something wrong about this statement.

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It was FINE. Nobody got hurt before. Why should we spend more money so some morons can do things they should not be doing? Maybe we should spend more money on surveillance and toss these clowns out of the zoo or into the tiger cage and let the poor animal have some good food.

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X2

I’ve chaperoned many a field trip over the past 8 years, including zoos.

This is exactly how it’s been done. You act up – you get a warning. You act up again – you go back to the bus and wait. We always have an adult on stand-by to sit with the little JDs that refuse to follow the rules.

We have great trips. The kids have a blast. We don’t expect them all to be perfect angels.
But we do have rules that everyone can (and will) follow.

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Quote:
Originally Posted by greasybenz
ITS A WILD ANIMAL, TAUNTED OR NOT IT SHOULD BE SAFLEY CONTAINED AND NOT ABLE TO ESCAPE.
As much as I may agree with what you're trying to say...

There's just something wrong about this statement.

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Maybe it's the word, "Wild". In our society we expect animals to behave like our dog or like a squirrel in the park. Most of us do not comprehend a system in which we are a prey item equal to a large pig in the life of the predator.

We think teasing or taunting a tiger is not unlike taunting a squirrel or a dog or a sibling or an ethnic minority. This is a fundamental misconception of our society -- that nature is tame, safe and cute.

We also delude ourselves into believing that which is wild can be made safe or can be reasoned with.

There is no possible way to make a large carnivore safe under all circumstances unless you kill it first. It is irrational to believe that any zoo could be designed to be perfectly safe under all circumstances. At some point we absolutely must assume that people will behave in a certain manner. If people behave outside of normal parameters we don't know what they may do -- that's how we define "outside of normal parameters".

By definition, anybody who would intentionally defeat the safeguards protecting observers from a major predator in order to deliberately taunt that predator is f**king fool and more importantly, a prey item.

I'm with you and with Howie on this. The predator was doing what is natural in a decidedly unnatural setting. It's not his fault. It's most definitely the f**king fool's fault. It may also be some partial responsibility of the zoo. OTOH, why in heck should we expect the zoo too make a fierce freaking monster-assed predator perfectly safe against food items that insist on taunting the predator?

Natural f**king selection in action, IMO. Pzzzt! Out of the gene pool, foo'!

B