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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Te futueo et caballum tuum

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