You could hear the $$$$$ signs in his voice.
He said that it didn't matter if his kid was tormenting the tiger, it was the zoo's fault.
The moat surrounding the enclosure from which a 350-pound tiger escaped on Christmas Day was actually far shorter than San Francisco Zoo officials thought and what national standards recommend, authorities said today.
The wall was only 12.5 feet high. Forget the dangling teen theory...the tiger could have jumped out flat footed.
Well, if I ever sat on such a jury, he'd have to answer two questions... First, if you were so close, why were you not even aware of what your son's Christmas day plans were, and second... how exactly has his death cost you several million dollars?
Oh, please. Once I read that the family was Brazilian, I knew we’d have hateful comments here.
The parents are divorced, and the kid was on his way from his father’s house to his mother’s crummy apartment (where she had a few modest gifts for him) and obviously went off with his friends for a bit.
Both parents are middle-age employed people, not Latin Kings, and the kid who was killed appears to have been an average high schooler who wanted to start a band, etc. and had a facebook page.
The father is a typical divorced dad, looking for bucks. I wonder what his support history is.
But be that as it may, everybody should stop hating them, please.
If the tiger could escape, it was the zoo’s fault. People who work with animals often, oddly enough, underestimate them. This was a wild animal, and while it may have been out of shape and was not having to hunt for its living, it was clearly more dangerous than the other animals (or it wouldn’t have chewed the arm off its keeper a year ago) and also always had the potential to do what its species can do.
I’ve seen lame old house cats take off from a sitting position and land on a spot six feet above their heads. The problem is that when people become very familiar with and sentimental about large animals, they forget the dangerous capabilities of that animal, and if it turns out that an annoyed, hungry and born-bad-natured tiger got out of her cage, then the zoo should pay up and there should be a major reevaluation of these things.
Big cats are dangerous. My son’s godmother grew up in St Louis in the 1920s, and one time when she was a child and went to visit a friend, the friend told her not to make any comment on her mother’s face. They had apparently been at the zoo a few years before and a tiger had reached out and dragged her baby brother, who was about 4 at the time and was standing behind the fence, into the cage and killed and started eating him in front of the mother before the keepers could intervene. The mother had a seizure that paralyzed one half of her face into a permanent scream.
These are dangerous animals and more people are killed by tigers than by any other animal in the world.
should tiger enclosures be taunt proof?