Year Ends With Zoos in News

I read the other day about a tiger in a zoo in china. It was killed right in her pen. Killed for her hide. They skinned her, right in her pen at the zoo. Now that is unbelievable. What is wrong with some people? Really.

Kittenz, you are probably right there about the tranq gun. Still may have been possible if they could have cordoned off the area, but obviously that was not the situation. As I said, it sounds from the reports like it was heading for a group of people, and I shuddered too to think of what it might have done. Take any group of people and throw a tiger into the mix (And an obviously irritated one, at that), and you will have mass and immediate panic. Even if it was the sweetest putty tat imaginable, their instincts will still kick in when faced with a dozen running, screaming potential prey items, even if it’s just to shut them up.

Mnynames- Also well said. I agree completely. I think a well designed zoo can be really quite indispensable for educational purposes as well as for conservation measures, and there is no better way to make people care than by seeing these creatures for themselves. Zoos are a great way to educate people as well as instill a sense of the need to conserve these animals because the zoo lets people see some of these fantastic creatures that they would have never had a chance to see otherwise and this can make a big difference from seeing pictures in books. The zoo is one of my favorite destinations for taking my high school biology students as seeing these things for themselves can teach an enormous amount about animals, evolution, the environment, and the importance of conservation more than I could convey through mere words.

All zoos are indeed not equal, and it breaks my heart when I hear about the ones where conditions for the animals are abysmal. I don’t know how some have been allowed to go on as long as they have. However I do think in this day and age, at least in the States and in Japan, the general trend tends to be that zoos are getting better, so that gives me something to hope for.

What the situation sounds like, to me, is a group of young men who maybe somehow were privy to inside information about the zoo, maybe some of them had worked there or something. Anyway maybe they knew how to open the enclosure. But what they did not count on was the immense strength and speed of an angry tiger. The dead boy was killed right outside the tiger’s enclosure, and then the tigress ran a few hundred feet to a cafe where it mauled two more teenaged boys. Some people are saying that those two boys were seen taunting the tigress. How did the tigress come to run to THAT place and attack THOSE boys? I think that maybe she chased them there after they let her out of her habitat. Just conjecture on my part, but sounds as plausible as anything else I have heard. I did hear on the news this evening that the zoo is now being treated as a crime scene, not an accident site.

None of that, whether it’s true or not, absolves the zoo’s responsibility for this awful incident. They should have had better security and emergency measures in place; the tigress should never have been able to escape or to be released by unauthorized people in the first place.

Once the tigress was out, it became imperative to keep her from getting into the general crowd of zoo visitors. I hate it that the tigress had to be killed, but I think of what it would be like, to have that angry 350 lb. cat loose in a mixed crowd of panicked people, and I shudder. What would I feel if that cat attacked me? Or worse yet, my little grandson, or my grandmother? What if there was a class of children there on a field trip? Most people do not know how to behave around wild animals under the best of circumstances, let alone when they are in a panicky crowd confronted with a disoriented, agitated full grown tigress.

Sedating the tiger was not a viable option in this case; the risk to public safety was too great. If the tigress had escaped outside public hours, at night, for instance, and the escape had been discovered, then the zoo personnel could have sedated the tigress and gotten her safely back into her enclosure. But to try to sedate her under the circumstances that occurred Christmas day would have been a terrible risk to take. A partially sedated cat is an extremely dangerous animal with all its predatory behaviors intact and no inhibitions whatsoever. A tiger does not have to actually maul a person to do serious damage; they can kill a cow with a swipe of a paw. What one could do in a crowd of people is too awful to contemplate.

What a tragic waste of two lives.

Having said that, Loren is quite right in saying that not all are equal, and some should never be allowed to remain open, whatever the circumstances (Many small zoos can quickly turn into animal hoarding situations). There is also a big difference between a cage and a habitat. Lastly, I agree that authorities are WAY too quick to slaughter dangerous escaped animals, regardless of whether or not they are endangered, but by the descriptions, this shooting may have been justified, as it was said to be approaching a large group of people. Why there wasn’t someone on the scene with a tranq gun is the question we should probably be asking.

In the United States, the proliferation of small zoos with little cages is giving way, albeit slowly, to a developing system where, due to public and scientific pressure, zoos become fewer in number, as those which can provide room and suitable (if sometimes simulated) habitats attract support. At the spacious, mainly outdoor exhibits for the aforementioned leopard and wolf at Cheyenne Mountain, visitors come even though they must accept that they may miss seeing a species entirely on any given visit.

At the National Zoo in Washington, DC, I spent quite a while looking at the foliage of the marmoset habitat without a sure sighting, and saw a tiger only at a distance. There’s a balancing act involved in choosing what animals to put in what habitats: a lot of people would be very upset if they traveled for hours to see the pandas and missed them. The pandas could do with more room and more animal company, but as long as they are well cared for, the service they perform in saving their species is, I think, worthwhile even though the animal obviously has no choice in it.

This leads into the question of motivating people toward putting their money, effort, and political clout into conservation programs. I’m not aware of any studies on this topic, but I don’t think that even the most superb wildlife photography (I’m watching “Planet Earth” on DVD as I write this) affects most people emotionally the way personally admiring a tiger or laughing at a playful orangutan a few yards away does.

Some zoos should not be open.

All zoos are not equal.

The capture and observation of Bigfoot in a progressive zoo would be the way I would prefer to prove they exist rather that killing the first one accepted by zoology.

King Kong is an imagined story and movie, and bringing that piece of fiction up seems a bit out of place in this discussion. Considering that a tiger and person died, what does the suffering of a fictional character have to do with anything here?