Posted on 12/27/2007 10:05:26 AM PST by knuthom
In the wake of reports that police are investigating whether a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo was taunted before attacking a trio of young men, the father of the teen who was killed doesn't think his son would "do such a foolish thing."
"I don't see the proof or the evidence yet," Carlos Sousa Sr. said in a phone interview this morning following a national appearance on "Good Morning America." "But kids are kids and you can't be watching them all the time."
Still, Sousa Sr. said he wanted to find out more information later today about what happened to his 17-year-old son, Carlos Jr., when he is scheduled to meet with a San Francisco police investigator "and get some more facts."
He added: "It could have been one of the other kids. And my kid could have just gotten it the worst."
Sousa Sr. has not yet visited the two other young men - San Jose brothers - in the hospital, and has not heard their account of what happened.
"Right now, I'm in shock," he said. "It's difficult going through this. I don't really feel like doing hospital visits. It's my only son."
Police are reportedly investigating whether one or more of the young men mauled by the tiger may have taunted the animal before its deadly rampage, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Police found a shoe and blood in an area between the gate and the edge of the animal's 25- to 30-foot-wide moat, prompting the possibility that one of the victims dangled a leg or other body part over the edge of the moat, according to the Chronicle. Carlos Jr. had spent Monday with his father and had been expected to be at his mother's for dinner. His parents are divorced. Marilza Sousa had a dinner of black beans and rice waiting for her son.
His parents figured their son - who didn't have a cell phone - was with friends. But they began calling his friends at 10 p.m. Christmas night, but none of them seemed to know where he was.
Carlos Sr. said he didn't know the full names of the other two men injured in the tiger attack that ended when San Francisco police shot and killed Tatiana, a 350-pound Siberian tiger.
Police Chief Heather Fong said Wednesday the department opened a criminal investigation "to see if the tiger was able to get out on its own or whether there was human involvement."
There is no security camera in the area that might have captured what transpired, she said. Officers are interviewing everyone who was at the zoo Christmas night.
"We are not exactly clear on what transpired," said the zoo's director Manuel Mollinedo.
Sometime shortly after 5 p.m., the tiger escaped from her fortified grotto, which is surrounded by a 20-foot-wide concrete moat and a 18-foot-high Mollinedo said he had never seen the tiger "down in the lower moat area," which is not filled with water. . Once free, Tatiana immediately attacked Carlos, who died at the scene.
Calls started flooding 911 at around 5:07 p.m.
Police arriving at the scene found Tatiana attacking another man near the zoo's Terrace Cafe, about 300 yards from the large-cat grotto. They hollered for it to stop and then shot it dead when the tiger began to move toward them, Fong said.
Fong said she did not know how many shots were fired.
Police and hospital officers have not released the names of the two men who were injured in the attack, but KTVU is reporting that all three men are from San Jose.
The two survivors under went hours of surgery to clean their wounds, San Francisco General Hospital's Rochelle Dicker said. Hospital officials said they are most worried about the possibility of infection and have put the young men, reportedly brothers ages 19 and 23, on antibiotics.
But, both men are doing "quite well," she said, crediting the quickness of their arrival to the hospital and their youth with their speedy recovery. Neither should suffer lasting physical effects of the attack, she said.
The zoo was closed Wednesday after the attack, almost exactly a year after Tatiana attacked her keeper during a feeding.
Officials made the decision to close the zoo "out of respect for the victims." It remains closed today.
Investigation into the incident continues. It is the first time that an escaped animal killed a visitor at a zoo accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, officials with the non-profit association said. Mollinedo said he has invited staff members from other zoo accredited by the association to help him review the cat enclosures, which will remain closed until public and animal safety can be insured. He said the rest of the zoo may reopen Thursday.
A statement on the AZA Web site says under the mandatory accreditation standards, the San Francisco Zoo must provide a thorough report of the incident to its independent Accreditation Commission, "which will review it and determine any actions that need to be taken. We will not speculate on what action might be taken until the facts are fully reviewed."
"AZA-accredited zoos are safe. Until this incident, there had not been a visitor fatality resulting from an animal escape at an AZA-accredited zoo. AZA mandatory accreditation standards require safety and emergency protocols that go beyond federal, state or local requirements. Regular safety training and annual emergency drills are required by these mandatory accreditation standards."
But People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals today called on the zoo to close its tiger exhibit.
"There are some species - including tigers - that simply do not belong in captivity because of their extraordinarily complicated physical and psychological needs," PETA captive exotic animal specialist Lisa Wathne said in a letter to Mollinedo. "Scientists at Oxford University have concluded that big cats and other wide-roaming predators become neurotic when they are confined. No 'educational' program is worth sacrificing animals' well-being."
According to the zoo's Web site, the zoo's two Siberian tigers, Tony and Tatiana, lived in an outdoor enclosure near the Lion House. The zoo also has three Sumatran tigers at the west end of the Lion House. Both types of tigers are classified as endangered species.
Tatiana's enclosure was reinforced after the cat's first attack two days before Christmas last year.
In the attack last year, Tatiana seriously injured keeper Lori Komejan's arm during a regular afternoon feeding at the Lion House.
The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health later ruled the zoo was responsible for that incident, blaming poor training and the way the tiger enclosures were designed.
Zoo officials closed the Lion House for renovations and did not open it until September. Tatiana's enclosure, which she shared with Tony, was fortified after the 2006 attack, Jenkins said.
Safety measures can only help so much when dealing with predators such as tigers, said Chris Austria, an animal trainer who has worked with tigers at Marine World in Vallejo and with bears at the San Francisco Zoo. The attacks likely had little to do with hunger, he said.
"San Francisco Zoo has always been very safety-conscious and well-trained," he said. "But when they're working with wild animals, they're very hard to control. When they escape their habitats, they can be very aggressive."
The association's accreditation standards also will require that the San Francisco Zoo provide a thorough report to its independent Accreditation Commission, which will review it and determine any actions that need to be taken. The association sends a team of investigators to inspect accredited facilities once every five years.
The U.S. Department of Agricultural, which regulates some facilities that work with live animals, will also investigate to attack, spokesman Jim Rogers said. The regulations that the department works with aren't specific, saying that outdoor fences less than 8 feet high enclosing dangerous animal like tigers must be approved by an administrator.
The parents are always amazed!
A “Not-My-Little-Angel!!” alert!
Sousa Sr would be better served shutting the hell up at this point.
The very idea that tigers have the mental faculties to remember exactly who taunted them is totally ridiculous - but we live in an age where people even believe in human induced global warming!
So you have evidence that tigers cannot cognitively target people who taunt them?
.... and your degree is in??????????
I bet the two latter victims were never out of that tigers sight. Remember this was late at night and the zoo was pretty much empty. I bet after the tiger killed its first victim it was right behind the other 2 as they fled. It just caught up with them at the cafe.
Discrimination studies using the touch screen
A new method for testing dogs cognitive abilities
Friederike Range, Ulli Aust, Michael Steuer, Ludwig Huber
A computer-automated touchscreen testing procedure for studying learning, social, and physical cognition in the dog (Canis familiaris) is described. Generally, the dogs’ task during each trial was to touch with their nose at images that are defined as positive by the experimenter. After an autoshaping procedure, in which the dogs learned to deliver the touch response to images, they were trained on two visual discrimination problems. In the first, the subjects learned to correctly choose between two simultaneously presented images; here we used simple forms (circle and square). In the second, they learned to look carefully to discriminate between two sets of stimuli, one consisting of three colour photographs of underwater scenes, the other of three arbitrary colour drawings. After successful performance on these problems, dogs were submitted to a dog-landscape visual categorization problem. They were first trained to discriminate between a large (N=60) set of dog pictures and an equally large set of landscape pictures. After reaching a criterion of 80% correct first choices, the dogs received 4 test sessions including 40 novel positive and negative stimuli. They successfully transferred their knowledge to the novel stimuli. We conclude that the touchscreen-based operant method for investigating cognition in dogs is valid and that it allows for direct comparison of cognitive abilities with other species (e.g., pigeons and monkeys).
http://www.nc.univie.ac.at/index.php?id=14571
I’m still trying to figure out what the cops thought was supposed to happen when they yelled at the man-eating tiger to “Stop!” For all they know, he didn’t even speak English. I have a 120-pound Doberman who, sufficiently annoyed at an intruder, wouldn’t stop were I yelling it in his ear. And a 300-pound tiger is going to look up and say, “Oh, sorry, didn’t realize you’d be upset.” I don’t think it works that way.
My thoughts, exactly.
He’s not enough in a state of shock to prevent him from appearing on GMA, it would appear......
Oops...just correcting myself. I guess it wasn't too late (around 5pm) but other stories I read say the zoo was close to closing and nearly empty. Thus I bet the victims were probably the only people the tiger really encountered as it attacked.
I agree with your theory. The tiger could have jumped that far, according to what I learned earlier.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1944711/posts?page=113
My post 113 there shows some tiger facts found on ask.com.
“The very idea that tigers have the mental faculties to remember exactly who taunted them is totally ridiculous”.
First, I have to admit I did laugh at the police yelling “stop” before the shot him. “Stop or we’ll shoot”?
What kind of taunting do you do to a tiger “your momma wears army boots” probably won’t work, or “you can’t catch me”.
What they are calling taunting is probably more like ‘teasing’, like they hung their arms over the edge, waving them around, and when the tiger jumped they’d pull back.
My guess would be that one time the tiger just got a particularly good jump, managed to hook a toe in a crack in the wall somewhere, just enough to get a hold up to get over the fence. Maybe there’s a little greenery growing on the wall that he was able to get some traction on or something.
Seems a good distance from the grotto to where the two who fled were tracked. If the place were empty or not, seems this tiger tracked them down. Anyone else its way probably would have suffered the same fate. It doesn’t appear to be chance that this tiger just happened upon them. I say he hunted them, which would indicate the tiger was acting on instinct to rid itself of a threat.
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