Archives for December 2007

RIP Tatiana the San Francisco Zoo’s tiger who attacked three zoo visitors, was shot and killed, and now has her own entry on Wikipedia.

Unless I hear something new, it is time to move onto other topics beyond the tiger attack but not before I share this little rant I found from Arod in San Francisco. (It is part of a longer post.)

*Snip*

So to the tiger … from tragedy to farce, as it were. I am convinced that the three little shits who paid with their bodies for the tiger’s rage had goaded it into coming after them. The evidence seems to go there. The tiger was loose for 19 minutes, and only went after three people. The tiger grotto is 40 years old and no tiger has escaped before. Sundry projectiles are found in the moat … by the way, is a moat still a moat without water in it? I think it’s a ditch.

Even so, this is a one in a million accident. Little shits torment zoo animals all the time. I remember watching little Indonesian shits throwing lit cigarets at an orangutan who was mired on a treeless island surrounded by a watery moat. The orangutan ate the cigarettes. What sort of creep torments a zoo animal? How low can someone sink? Well, it turns out that the surviving Dhaliwal brothers are local tyrants who get drunk and act up and terrorize their neighbors. They have sundry drunk-and-disorderly type charges pending. Notwithstanding the valueless pronouncements of San Francisco’s poster-girl police chief, this was a crime scene, and the tiger was the hapless victim.

Still … one in a million. Sousa … the dead one … gets a Darwin award, but his elimination form the gene pool was not a result solely of stupidity … stupidity has never been a bar to reproduction, alas … but the result of dumb bad luck. Again, the coffee and upholstery skeptic in me wonders why a tiger with 19 minutes on his hands couldn’t have saved the neighbors any further trouble with the Dhaliwal boys, but that too is accident.

You can’t predict these things. The results will be reams of ink, as they say in the news biz, and at least three lawsuits. It will cost San Francisco and the nominally independent zoo a pot of money. And there will be breast beating about tigers in capitivity, and less attention to the fact that there are more tigers in captivity than in the wild.

All the result of an accident.

*Snip*

Glad someone else is ranting…I know a lot of animal lovers are ranting. What gets me is that if the tiger was provoked, I believe the guys are going to probably not face any consequences.

Does anyone else think that if they did do something to fire up Tatina that perhaps they should be charged as accessories to something like manslaughter?

No wonder they are not talking. Most of the public seems to think they are guilty of something.

My questions:

• Why the heck were guys that age at the zoo alone anyway instead of with their pals?
• Did anyone get their cell phones to see if they were recording a video or taking snaps?

The victims are still not commenting, Fong the police chief has quieted down, and someone finally got Manuel Mollinedo to shut his mouth…previous comments are probably going to bite them in the butt–so to speak.

So, now that we are several days aways from the tiger attack incident the news reports have slowed down some–but that does not mean San Francisco Zoo’s troubles are over.

The two other tiger victims were released from the hospital yesterday. They have not wanted to talk with anyone about the incident and reports are that they have been uncooperative with law enforcement officials.

The zoo may loose its exhibitor license but it is too early to tell. However, a Federal investigation into the tiger attack incident has been reported. Big trouble and I bet the AZA inspector is getting an ear full. The AZA is the group that accredited the zoo and failed to notice the tiger grotto wall was substandard.

Yikes. Granted, nobody goes around with a measuring tape–but maybe it is a practice that needs to be implemented.

I shared insider secrets about inspectors…they don’t always notice what they should.

Yes, there is a problem for the zoo. But I can’t dismiss the notion that the victims contributed to the reason the tiger was agitated enough to escape. If so, they probably won’t be charged with anything–if my understanding is correct.

More disturbing facts were released today when it was discovered how chaotic the whole scene was–details revealed from the police and fire logs.

Still wondering if they even had mutual aid agreements in place. What a mess.

I am still waiting to hear about the forensic findings and I’d love to have a look at the necropsy reports.