Here is a pic of the wall and fence:
Posted on 01/17/2008 7:08:12 PM PST by yorkie
One of the two survivors of the San Francisco Zoo tiger attack that left a 17-year-old fatally mauled told the victim's father that the three had yelled and waved at the animal while standing atop the railing of the tiger's enclosure, police said in court documents filed Thursday.
Paul Dhaliwal, 19, denied throwing anything into the enclosure or otherwise antagonizing the animal, according to an account contained in police investigators' request for a search warrant in connection with the Christmas Day attack that killed Carlos Sousa Jr. of San Jose.
Police armed with the warrant and seeking evidence that the men had taunted the tiger searched the 2002 BMW belonging to Dhaliwal's 23-year-old brother, Kulbir, on Wednesday. They also reviewed the brothers' cell phones for any photos they might have taken before the tiger attacked.
Police said they had recovered messages and images, but apparently nothing incriminating in connection with the tiger attack. Investigators seized a small amount of marijuana as well as a partially filled bottle of Grey Goose vodka from the car, according to the inventory that police submitted from the search.
They also found a kit commonly used to defeat drug testing, which included a vial of unisex synthetic urine, police said. Paul Dhaliwal was on probation stemming from a drunken driving incident and crash that occurred before the attack.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
looking for link...
Well, if the only consequences for teasing a tiger was just to get thrown out, then I suppose there wouldn’t be any problem with teasing a tiger. There were two enclosures. If the idiots hadn’t went over the first one, they would have been safe.
hey I mourn the tiger too. This whole thing should have been prevented.
Whether they teased it or not isn’t even relevant.
The compound should have been designed so that a tiger could never get out.
The compound should have been designed so that a person could never get in.
Thanks! I still say there is something wrong at this zoo. It needs to be shut down until the animals are secure & both animals & people are safe from each other.
Here is a pic of the wall and fence:
............or run for POTUS.
thanks for that pic, first time I’ve seen it. Terrible a life was lost here. And too bad we lost a bionic Tiger.
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
Me, too. Stupid people invade a wild animals space and challenge it and the animal does what wild animals do and the animal gets killed. Sad.
You keep saying "We" when you mean "I". When you say "We" it implies you are speaking for others besides yourself, and you're not speaking for most of the people here. "I" hope the zoo doesn't have to pay a dime.
If you were a zoo visitor and an escaped tiger slashed your son’s throat and chomped down on your daughter’s head, you might feel differently... especially when you find out that zoo employees knew for years that this could happen.
I hate it when people tease and abuse animals. I really do.It shows their character quite clearly. But would you feel the same way about this man's death if you would have been there and saw the actual killing?
I knew you’d pull that out again. First of all, the woman said she *shoo’ed* the tiger back. Do you really believe that?
2nd, that worker was hanging over the edge of that moat - just where the victims were.
3rd, the story about the tiger leaping the 33-foot-wide moat is not believable.
And it still looks the same as it did when they were working on it a couple of weeks ago. So?
Thanks. So this zoo is basically unsafe then & in 40 years nobody did a thing because nobody was attacked before? It took this attack to get everyones attention. Well thats awfully sad. But I still stand by what I have been posting to you & we have agreed.. (remember?) People should not hiss, caw or roar at the animals.
Not believable?
How did Jack Hanna put it? “Impossible!” - when he was asked if the tiger could jump over the wall.
Two days later he was eating crow.
As a very small boy, riding my small bike and following many larger neighborhood kids riding their bigger bikes, we were attacked by a German Shepherd who, as it turned out, had been much teased and taunted. We were passing a farm where he was the dog. As he came out to the line of bikes, by the time he got there I was the one nearest and lowest to the ground. He sunk his teeth into my calf. It makes a lasting impression.
I NEVER make mistrakes!
That’s too bad. I’m looking to buy a nice mist rake.
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