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>>>Where did you get this?<<

” ... There has been lots of evidence that the zoo had failed for decades to keep their tiger in the pen. ...”

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SF Woman Warned Zoo 10 Years Ago Tiger Wall Not High Enough

POSTED: 11:56 am PST December 28, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO — A San Francisco woman has said she warned the city zoo more than 10 years ago that the safety walls at the tiger grotto weren’t high enough.

She said she was afraid for her safety and that of her 3-year-old 10 years ago.

“This whole image came back to me in my brain and I was sick to my stomach actually,” said Marian Roth-Cramer.

She says she saw a tiger, housed in the same grotto as Tatiana, the one that mauled three people this week, jump dangerously close to her little boy.

The animal left the yard, leapt crossed the moat, and got a paw up on the grassy area by the fence where the public stands.

“I saw the tiger leap off of that and disappear,” Roth-Cramer said. “Then I saw a paw on top of the grass, which was maybe 4 or 5 feet in front of my son.”

Roth-Cramer said she wrote a letter to the zoo, but never heard back.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1945827/posts

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Here are two more accounts of tigers jumping that moat:

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But escaping from an enclosure at the zoo is not beyond the ability of a Siberian tiger, according to a retired longtime keeper and other zoo veterans interviewed by The Chronicle.

And many people who worked at the zoo knew it, the keeper said.

The keeper, who spent decades at the zoo and asked not to be publicly identified, said he got the word about Siberian tigers - and the apparently inadequate 12 1/2-foot-high moat wall that protects the public from them - in a most dramatic fashion, not long after he began working at the zoo.

“I was putting a sign up in front of the tiger exhibit, with my butt hanging over the edge,” said the former keeper. “The cat was pacing back and forth at the bottom of the grotto.”

The keeper said one of his more seasoned colleagues happened by, grabbed him by the belt loop and jerked him back, away from the edge.

“He shared the secret that people knew - the cat could jump up and take me down,” the keeper said.

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.

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/29/MN00U6PR7.DTL&feed=rss.news